The March/April issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet is out now.

In columns for this issue, Sarah Durcan outlines her ongoing research project, ‘The Memory-Image’, as well as a related screening event at the Irish Film Institute in January. Sara Greavu discusses the evolution of CCA Derry’s dedicated reading group, booksvscigarettes, which aims to bring concentration and care to a range of texts, through the attentive act of communal reading. The Skills Column for this issue comes from James L. Hayes, who discusses experimental casting processes, technologies and materials, as well as the most recent iteration of his ongoing ‘Iron-R’ project. Reflecting on the many uncertainties currently facing artists in Northern Ireland, VAI NI Manager Rob Hilken outlines the challenges of the new social security payment, Universal Credit. 

This issue features several interviews with artists whose exhibitions are currently showing nationally or internationally. Joanne Laws interviews Nick Miller about the evolution of his painting practice and his exhibition, ‘Rootless’ – currently showing at Art Space Gallery in London – while Chris Hayes speaks to Grace Weir about her current exhibition, ‘Time Tries All Things’, at The Institute of Physics, London. Both exhibitions run until the 29 March, Brexit day, after which time the shipping of artworks to and from the UK is likely to become more complicated. In addition, Andrea Neill interviews Martina Coyle about her upcoming exhibition, ‘Paradise Is Too Far’, which will open on 30 March at Áras Inis Gluaire Gallery, Belmullet, County Mayo.

Recent Sligo IT graduate, Hazel McCrann, discusses her art practice and her recent show, ‘Peripheral Visions’, which ran at the Hyde Bridge Gallery, Sligo, as part of her Graduate Solo Exhibition Award. Melissa O’Faherty and Kiera O’Toole explain the evolution of the Irish contemporary drawing collective, Drawing de-Centred, while Tobi Maier discusses his recent curatorial residency at The Glucksman and his stay in Carraig-na-gcat, County Cork. In her extended essay, entitled ‘Seeing the Light’, Renata Pekowska reflects on several recent exhibitions across Ireland dedicated to the medium of light. In the Artist Publishing section, Annabel König discusses two of her recent publications, which use Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ as a point of departure.

The Regional Focus for this issue comes from Cork city, with profiles from: The Glucksman; Crawford Art Gallery; Backwater Artists Group; National Sculpture Factory; and Cork Artists Collective and The Guesthouse. Recent CIT graduate, Ciara Rodgers, outlines her research, as part of the MA Art & Process (MA:AP), and Cork-based artists Ailbhe Ní Bhrian and Darn Thorn discuss their recent work.

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

Source

JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS NICK MILLER ABOUT HIS PAINTING PRACTICE AND HIS CURRENT EXHIBITION IN LONDON.

Joanne Laws: The term ‘Encounter Painting’ is commonly associated with your work. I guess this relates to things happening in your daily life and how you respond to them? 

Nick Miller: Not really, it’s more formal than that. Back in 1988, still in my late-twenties, I had a kind of eureka moment about what art could be for me while on a residency in Dublin Zoo. I began to draw from life again, facing the otherness of animals in captivity. It became about meeting and holding contained energy through the act of drawing. It coincided with my reading of Martin Buber’s extraordinary book, I and Thou ¹. This helped frame my interest in trying to hold the life that I encountered in the material form of art. Since then, my practice slowly evolved to be one of setting up the conditions necessary (in the studio or outside) to encounter things – a person, landscape, or object – in a practice environment where there is also the best possibility of making a painting. 

JL: I remember a kind of eastern influence manifesting in your work in the mid-90s. Was that through your engagement with Tai Chi? 

NM: Yes. It followed on directly from starting to define that sense of ‘practice’ but was a parallel learning system. In the ‘90s, I was lucky enough to study in America with a friend of Alan Watts, Chungliang Al Huang.² An aspect of his teaching was very visual, using calligraphy as embodied physical movement. It gave me a way into that world of integrating eastern thought into a very western rooted art practice. You may remember from my teaching in the life room back then, that I used to get people to do physical movements and breath work, to try and wake up. Painting from life is a most literal ‘mind-body’ activity – absorbing information from outside, processing internally and releasing into the material of paint. Taoist thought offers a non-linear, spherical kind of approach, where the result is almost a fortunate ‘left over’ from your commitment to practice. 

JL: In your engagement with the archetypes of painting – landscape, portraiture and still life – are you are grappling with the medium to make this territory your own? 

NM: Yes, I suppose I am. We all look to enter art and hopefully find something authentic. A lot of the time – and I know, because I’ve taught in art college – education tends to iron out ‘wrongness’, so that artists can perform in a professional ‘art world’. I never got ironed out, so I used my ‘wrongness’ to make work. I could just say that I’m an old fashioned ‘life’ painter and leave it at that, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. In some ways, I’m not so interested in art. I’m interested – from necessity in the ‘art of living’ – with the problems of being a painter. Contradicting myself, I actually do have an enduring love for all those genres in the history of Western art. It is finding affirmation in the works of very different artists, in paintings that for me are portals across time – repositories of contained energy – that completely absorb and charge me.

JL: Your sitters are often fellow artists and friends, like Alice Maher or Janet Mullarney, then some of whom have since sadly passed away – including Barrie Cooke, Anthony Cronin Seán McSweeney and John McGahern. When that happens, do you find that their portraits almost take on an archival function? Is this work about posterity?

NM: Not really, or not at first. I started by painting my family and friends – no one with a public life. Portraiture is my first love, and I continually return to it as the root of all my work. The most exciting encounter is of one human to another and in my own personal trajectory, I like to hold something of the people I’ve met. As I became rooted in Ireland and the relatively accessible artistic community here, paying respect to those artists, writers or anybody who ends up sitting for me, is something I like to do. In truth, I feel most real when painting – that is the best of me – connecting to them. As people die, as we all do, I suppose the paintings can become a historical record, but I can’t have that as a goal – it gets in the way. I am not an archivist.

JL: Where ‘Vessels: Nature Morte’ reflects the utter collapse of meaning that happens when someone dies, your most recent series, ‘Rootless’, seems to transcend individual loss to focus more on the collective and the political. Can you discuss the evolution of this new work?

NM: My last still life series, ‘Vessels: Nature Morte’, had a deeply personal energetic core from a long collaborative project in North West Hospice, and the parallel passing of my own parents. For me they were the opposite to the “collapse of meaning”. They were about holding the last moments of life and meaning before it left. After that work, I was somewhat lost in the studio, wanting dialogue, but unable to find the people or conversations I needed to have. Like many of us, I was trying to process this crazy world that we’re all having to live with – the political mayhem that we seem to be generating on the planet, the climatic mayhem, the migratory suffering – all this stuff we are facing. In a fairly intense period in 2017-2018, I began processing that lack of dialogue in my own way, in the large-scale canvases that became the ‘Rootless’ paintings. They took on a life of their own, asserting the urgency of nature. I was exploring disorder and the possibilities of integration in more complex compositions, some of which I showed at the Oliver Sears Gallery in Dublin last year, but are currently being shown more completely at Art Space Gallery in London.

JL: I also remember your ‘Truckscapes’ with great affection. At what point did you decide to include the ‘viewing device’ of the doorway within those compositions?  

NM: The first couple of years in the mobile studio, I couldn’t find a way to paint. I was really high, enjoying the mad freedom of being in the landscape, meeting the rural world in which I was living, but there was a dissatisfaction in me – they just looked like ‘pictures’ that did not need to exist. I had been scraping off paint, correcting things and it was starting to dot around the truck doorframe. And then in 2001, while working on a painting of a Whitethorn tree in a neighbour’s field, I radically re-worked the painting to include the truck interior and the paint-spattered doorway looking out onto the tree, like a standing portrait.³ My experience became defined by the protection of the truck as a studio, of culture with a relatively narrow doorway to the infinite world of complexity outside – as a tortoise in my shell. I realised these were not landscapes, but ‘Truckscapes’. I began to adjust my practice of making them in the context of the truck view, and that’s how they became something real for me, as paintings of land, trees or whatever. 

JL: Many people recognise your muted and organic colour palette as being particular to your work. Does it come from living in the west of Ireland? 

NM: Basically yes… It is muted in an adjustive way, starting with a very broad palette (contrary to any advice I would ever give anyone). You’re trying to coalesce something into being, but the colour comes from nature. It is something to do with the light here. My studio is a warehouse with dirty, natural, overhead light. I’m trying to hold life – not commemorate it but hold it in the present – through a kind of alchemy. Through training, I work at an intense and surprisingly fast pace that suits my temperament. I’ve learned to relate it to focus in sport. 

JL: Do you drink Lucozade Sport while painting?!

NM: I’m trying to reduce sugar intake! Having taken up tennis as a first ever sport at 48 after a life of indolence, now it is taking over. After 10 years playing, I have competed for Connacht at Inter-Provincials, and at that level I am mostly losing with determined style. The concentration needed is similar to painting – a sustained attention, but on a yellow ball. Now I’m also swimming every morning in the sea – mainlining nature through cold water. I’ve become an addict. My partner Noreen describes it as my daily electric shock treatment, which is not far from the truth. It resets mind and body, until I return to my normal zombie-like self by the end of the day, catching up on Netflix or Brexit. My show in London ends on 29 March. Since I was born there and, after 34 years finally becoming an Irish citizen, it seems morbidly symbolic to me that my show is ending on Brexit day. 

Nick Miller is an artist based in County Sligo. His exhibition, ‘Rootless’, continues at Art Space Gallery, London, until 29 March. 
nickmiller.ie
artspacegallery.co.uk

Notes
¹ Martin Buber, I and Thou, first published in German in 1923.
² See: Alan Watts and Chungliang Al Huang, Tao: The Watercourse Way (Pantheon: 1975).
³ Whitethorn, truck view (2000-01), oil on linen. Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Feature Image:
Janet Mullarney sitting for Nick Miller in his studio in 2017; photograph courtesy of the artist

Source

CHRIS HAYES TALKS TO GRACE WEIR ABOUT HER CURRENT EXHIBITION AT THE INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS, LONDON.  

Fight with Cudgels (c.1820–23) is a painting by Francisco Goya that depicts two men duelling, and with each step, slowing sinking further into the mud below them. Their supposed opposition is a misreading; their struggle is not between two distinct forces, but a situation which they create together and for each other. “With every move they make,” wrote French philosopher Michel Serres, “they are gradually burying themselves together.” The image appealed to Serres as a metaphor for a relationship between two things, in this instance, that of people and the threat of climate catastrophe, which he discusses in his book, The Natural Contract (1995).

“So, it’s this point that I like very much,” Grace Weir says about Serres and Goya, “how he says that the differences are moot. As we’re dealing with ideas of our potential distinctions, this image throws the relationship between these things.” We’re discussing Weir’s solo exhibition at the vast new gallery in the Institute of Physics in London. Her filmic installation, Time Tries All Things, is characteristic of much of Weir’s work –reflecting on complex scientific and philosophical ideas about time, and emerging out of collaborations with notable figures, on this occasion, Professor David Berman of Queen Mary University of London and Professor Fay Dowker of Imperial College London. For Weir, Serres’s analysis of the Goya painting suggests not just a model of ethics – people and their environment entangled, dependent – but a useful understanding of knowledge. She states: “you can’t have a concept of history without a concept of time.” Any means of understanding the world has multiple starting points; just as the struggle of the two men brings them together, any disciplines, ways of working or communicating are inescapable from each other.

But don’t describe this as ‘art meeting science’. Weir tells me: “I should say, I hate ugly hybrids. I’m very, very critical of sci-art, or whatever they call it.” She goes on to explain that she is “a little bit tired of the art and science conversation”. It’s a cultural conversation she’s been actively involved in for over 20 years. After completing an MA in New Media in the late ‘90s, an interest in concepts of time naturally emerged out of her work in film. This relationship between time and moving image has been central to the work of countless artists, from Warhol and beyond. It seems that Weir’s important contribution here is to go much, much deeper.

“I’ve been following a particular train of thought for ages – and it was really about wanting to understand time better. In the late ‘90s, new media and film were thought of differently than we think of them now. I wanted to understand the nature of time because I was working in film. And that’s what led me to want to meet a physicist, to want to understand relativity. It took about 18 months of talking to the physicist before I understood it. And really, coming to understand that had a transformative impact – it changed me. I always say it’s not something you can recover from, and I don’t want to either.”

And this pivotal moment has reverberated through her practice ever since. One of the most significant manifestations was her retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, titled ‘3 Different Nights, recurring’ (7 November 2015 – 28 March 2016), which comprised some 30 works, including three major film commissions. This new commission at the Institute of Physics continues and elaborates upon many of her central concerns. Densely packed with elaborate scientific and philosophical ideas – such as space-time illusions and quantum mechanics – the video’s focus is resolutely personal and material, centring on a number of individuals who are drawing and carving from stone.

There’s a connection to the physicality of the drawing and stone carving depicted on-screen, and how Weir is directly involved with the camera work and the editing. “Editing is about time,” Weir explains. “How it’s cut up, how the film is paced. You’re controlling when shots are coming, when they’re not. Things don’t need to be sequential, they can loop back into each other. They don’t have to follow a beginning, middle and end. These are all choices.” Cleary, time, control, authorship and the fundamental basis for these scientific concepts is reflected by what happens, how it happens and how it’s shown – it’s as layered and elaborate as these ideas are complex. 

Time Tries All Things comprises two films, presented as a dual-screen installation. As explained by Weir, one film is more linear, while the other one is cut up, with each film having “a completely different sense of time.” This dual format is reflective of the physicists she’s collaborated with and how differently they conceive of these ideas. The artist is telling this story through scripts, camera work, voiceover and a heavily involved installation process. And while Weir mentions how important it is to have a budget to collaborate – to bring in people with different skills and to finalise the piece in different ways – she’s clear about her role and responsibilities as the editor. During our conversation, it becomes apparent how important the process of making the work is. Just as she took control during the extensive editing process, Weir also worked for several days on the installation, taking a hands-on approach to everything necessary for this show to come together.

But for Weir, to place too much emphasis on the outcome is to miss the whole picture. “As I’ve become more familiar with the field of science, when I hear the word ‘science’ now, it’s a bit like I would hear the word ‘art’ – this could mean everything, from opera to concrete poetry. So, if someone’s going to talk about art, and they mean all of this and more, I’m a bit perplexed; what are you talking about? And specifically, what are you talking about? Even within the field of physics, there’s applied physics, theoretical physics. And they’re all very, very different. Different in their approaches and in their outcomes.”

“I find it very difficult. The more I’ve engaged scientists the more, actually, I find it difficult to make a statement on it because… I suppose, fundamentally, I don’t know what we can really obtain here. I’m sceptical of it, this pitting one generality against another. Having said that, of course I don’t think all things are equal and all things are the same. There are, of course, strong divergences in the field. I don’t go out to engage with scientists. That thought never comes to me. When I’m talking with David [Berman], it’s not like I’m there with my artist hat on and they’re there as scientists. We’re people, sitting in a space discussing something. It’s not about the outcome – there may even be no outcome. It’s the desire to be in that space with somebody, when you’re both engaged with the topic, that drives me to collaborate. I very much like that space – before things are art, or before things are science.”

Chris Hayes is an Irish writer based in London and the founder of The Emotional Art Magazine. 

Grace Weir is an artist and filmmaker based in County Leitrim. ‘Time Tries All Things’ continues at Institute of Physics, London, until 29 March 2019.
graceweir.com

Feature Image:
Grace Weir, Time Tries All Things, 2019, installation view, Institute of Physics; photograph by Thomas Skovsende, courtesy Institute of Physics.

Source

MELISSA O’FAHERTY AND KIERA O’TOOLE DISCUSS THE IRISH CONTEMPORARY DRAWING COLLECTIVE, DRAWING DE-CENTRED.

Diverse-nomadic-open-provoke-interim-decenterd-trail-liminal-sift-provisional-testing-scratch. 

Drawing de-Centred is an artist collective and online platform for exploring contemporary drawing practice and research. In 2016, six professional Irish artists, whose practice is rooted in drawing, first met at a peer critique event, organised by Visual Artists Ireland and chaired by Arno Kramer. Kramer is a visual artist, curator and founder of Drawing Centre Diepenheim in The Netherlands, who champions contemporary drawing in all its diversity. One of the many outcomes of this serendipitous encounter was the establishment of a drawing-focused platform, titled ‘Drawing de-Centred’ (DdC). The title of the collective originated from the geographical diversity of the group, which extends to the north, south and west of Ireland. 

The collective is brought together by a shared understanding of contemporary drawing, characterised by openness, embodiment and present-ness. We also have an interest in advocating drawing practice in Ireland. Our aim as a collective is to share knowledge and resources and to encourage a collaborative and public approach to drawing, with a particular focus on flexibility, liminality and impermanence. In practice, the group meet online via video conferencing technology and in person, whenever project decisions are made. DdC member Felicity Clear states that the collective “allows for testing and trying out, entering a collective space where the total responsibility for the work is somewhat relinquished and an open conversation can take place. It can be nimble, flexible, playful and economic.” Our diverse drawing practices range from traditional pencil on paper, to three-dimensional drawing in the expanded field, using neon lights or found, natural and manmade materials. The collective share a keen interest in encouraging critical thinking around drawing, questioning what drawing is, but also what drawing can be. 

Our inaugural project, titled ‘Drawing as Interruption’, developed the idea of how drawing might act as a form of disruption. Individual artists responded to this proposition through site-specific drawings in rural, urban, public or private spaces. This methodology served as a testing ground for creating dialogue between drawings and in relation to site. Our initial iteration was curated by Kiera O’Toole and Felicity Clear and installed in O’Toole’s studio in The Model, Sligo. The second iteration was curated by Felicity Clear, Melissa O’Faherty and Mary-Ruth Walsh in the Independent Studios, Temple Bar, Dublin. This exhibition ran for one week in a temporarily vacant artist studio. For this iteration, some of the artists developed new work and installed these alongside existing works to form fresh configurations, allowing for new visual dialogues. DdC gathered momentum from the positive response we received from peers, the public and the many curators who visited this exhibition.

In keeping with the notion of ‘de-centering’, the collective’s third iteration, curated by Melissa, was installed on the grounds of a historical farm and buildings in County Wicklow. Melissa made new drawings and videos in response to the other artist’s work insitu. Melissa states: “I enjoy the notion of de-Centered, in that the work is non-reliant on gallery spaces. In this way, there can be more freedom over the placement of work which, in turn, can activate interesting outcomes”. Similarly, Kiera O’Toole’s practice and research engages in the phenomenology of site-specific drawing. Kiera states “I’m interested in drawing’s capacity to bring forth the essence of a phenomena, while making connections that arise between the aesthetic experience and the surrounding environment and/or society”. However, Kiera could not visit the site, so Melissa and Kiera decided to simultaneously draw their lived experiences by recording elements of their perceptual experiences. Given that Melissa was located on the farm and Kiera was in Sligo, both artists agreed to a timeframe to start and finish the drawings. By taking a phenomenological approach, drawing becomes a device for perceiving and understanding the world as it appears. As described by DdC member, Mary-Ruth Walsh, drawing can be used as a “thinking tool”, which variously considers: “drawing to communicate, drawing as a physical act, drawing as writing, drawing to familiarise yourself, drawing’s relationship to material, performative drawing, contemplative drawing encounters and drawing that re-frames a space”. 

In 2019, Kevin Killen will host the next iteration in Belfast, followed by Mary-Ruth Walsh in Wexford and Rachael Agnew in Wicklow. Like Kiera, Rachael explores a philosophical underpinning of phenomenology in relation to site-specific drawing. Racheal’s practice and research explores “the fundamental ontology of interstitial space”, referring to “in-between, empty, transitional, transient or non-places that are assumed and unquestioned”. The concept of space is also explored in Kevin Killen’s walking journeys. Kevin notes that although he known as a sculptural artist, drawing is an integral part of his practice. Kevin studies people’s physical space and the journeys that they make, noting: “I use traditional drawing tools to translate journeys into maps [and] recreate using neon. Initially, my drawings were part of the process to create the finished neon, but now I see them as works in their own right”. Space, place and the everyday is also explored in Mary-Ruth Walsh’s practice. Walsh focuses on architectural spaces and how they affect the way we move and behave, stating: “I make imagined, yet impossible proposals, realised through drawing [so that] we see the commonplace anew” (maryruthwalsh.org). 

Our themed project, ‘Drawing as Interruption’, is providing us the time and space to discover each other’s practice in deep and meaningful ways. Furthermore, it is providing the opportunity to reflect on various approaches regarding contemporary drawing practice, relying on the inner-workings of the group to further develop rich modes of collaboration. We envision DdC as an evolving and flexible collective and going forward, we intend to continue exhibiting both inside and outside the gallery space. We hope to work with curators and drawing practitioners for future projects in Ireland and abroad. 

For additional information on current projects and future exhibitions, visit drawingdecentred.com

Melissa O’Faherty is a visual artist based in Stylebawn Farm Studios, County Wicklow.
melissaofaherty.com

Kiera O’Toole visual artist, researcher and educator based in County Sligo. 
kieraotooleartist.com

The other DdC members are: visual artist and researcher Rachael Agnew, who lives and works in Dublin (rachaelagnew.com); artist and educator, Felicity Clear (felicityclear.com); Belfast-based visual artist, Kevin Killen (kevinkillen.com); and Mary-Ruth Walsh, a visual artist, curator and writer based in New Ross, County Wexford (maryruthwalsh.com).

Feature Image:
Felicity Clear, DdC Farm site; site curation/photography  Melissa O’Faherty, courtesy of DdC

Source

ROB HILKEN OUTLINES THE CHALLENGES OF THE UNIVERSAL CREDIT SYSTEM FOR ARTISTS IN NORTHERN IRELAND. 

Artists in Northern Ireland are being challenged by a range of uncertainties. Brexit is casting a looming shadow, but with so many unknowns about the nature of any withdrawal agreement, it is very hard to put plans in place that will mitigate against potentially negative impacts. But even before Brexit comes into effect, there is another issue that is already having a significant impact on the livelihoods of artists in Northern Ireland – that of the United Kingdom’s new benefits scheme, called Universal Credit.

Universal Credit is the new ‘simplified’ benefits system that combines Jobseekers Allowance, Housing Benefit, Working Tax Credit, Employment and Support Allowance, Child Tax Credit and Income Support into one single payment. Universal Credit was initially announced by the Conservative government in 2010 and has slowly been rolled out across the UK since 2013, reaching Northern Ireland in late 2017. If you make a new application for benefits today, you will go straight into the Universal Credit system, while anyone on existing benefits schemes are currently being migrated to Universal Credit. If you are still receiving benefits under one of the old schemes, any significant change in your circumstances may trigger your automatic migration to the new system. This includes changes to your employment status, address or family details. 

However, the switch to Universal Credit is not just a change to a more ‘streamlined’ system. It also changes how benefits are calculated. Depending on your individual circumstances, the amount of benefits you will receive may change quite dramatically compared to the old system. You can use an online calculator to work out how much you may receive (entitledto.co.uk). As you earn more from your employment or self-employment, the amount you receive will reduce. 

Universal Credit and the various benefit schemes it aims to replace are designed to support people with no or low income. Many artists fall into these categories, often relying on part-time jobs to supplement income from their artistic practice. There are three aspects of Universal Credit that will significantly affect artists: The Minimum Income Floor; proving that you are ‘gainfully self-employed’; and managing monthly fluctuations in your income and expenditure.

Most artists are self-employed and in order to qualify for Universal Credit, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) must determine whether you are ‘gainfully self-employed’. They define this as having “self-employment in a trade, profession or vocation [that] should be your main occupation. It must also be organised, developed, regular and carried out in expectation of profit”. To do this we recommend that you have a business plan that demonstrates your strategic priorities and financial projections for the coming year. If you are also employed, they will decide if self-employment is your main occupation, based on the number of hours worked and the income you generate from it. If they decide you are not gainfully self-employed as an artist, your ‘work coach’ will expect you to commit to looking for a job, or you must decide not to claim any benefits.

The second aspect of Universal Credit that artists will find challenging to manage is the Minimum Income Floor (MIF). The Minimum Income Floor is a figure based on the number of hours you are available to work per week (usually 35) multiplied by the National Living Wage (currently £7.83 and rising to £8.21 in April for those over 25). Universal Credit assumes that everyone will earn this amount each month. If your self-employment income is less than that, your benefits are calculated from that figure instead of your earnings. Your work coach may ask you to make efforts to increase your monthly income to meet the Minimum Income Floor.

If you have been registered as self-employed for less than a year, then you may be entitled to a ‘start-up period’ of a year to develop your business, where the MIF does not apply. 

Universal Credit comes with more onerous reporting requirements and you must submit details of your income (profit) every month. Whereas the old systems averaged your income and expenditure out over the whole year, the new system calculates your benefits on a monthly basis.

This system works if you have a regular monthly income and should help people avoid cases where they might be asked to repay money due to mid-year changes to their work circumstances. The challenge for artists is that this does not allow for monthly or seasonal fluctuations in your income. If you do not generate any income for several months (while your are producing a new body of work for example), you may be asked to look for new work, and may be subject to sanctions if you do not meet this responsibility. Conversely, if you generate a larger amount of sales in a short period (due to an exhibition or commission for example) you may be refused benefits for that period and subsequent months, due to generating a higher income.

As mentioned above, every person wishing to claim Universal Credit will have a ‘work coach’ assigned to them and you must attend an interview with them for your application to be approved. Many people find this interview intimidating, but when you consider the additional complexities of the needs of a self-employed artist in relation to the benefits system, it can become a daunting prospect indeed. The interview is important, as is your relationship with your work coach, because the sanctions they can impose (cuts to your benefits) can be severe and can last for up to three years.

There are independent welfare advisors who can help you prepare for your interview and application. You can contact an organisation such as Advice NI (adviceni.net) or Citizens Advice (citizensadvice.org.uk) for help. 

Rob Hilken is Northern Ireland Manager of Visual Artists Ireland. 

Source

MART Gallery, Dublin
10 January – 14 February 2019

This is the third year of MART’s Exhibition Award, in partnership with CIT Crawford College of Art & Design (CCAD) and Fire Station Artists’ Studios (FSAS). Curated by Deirdre Morrissey, ‘Lectus’ platforms the work of Èanna Heavey, Sarah Diviney (both CCAD graduates) and IADT graduate Emma McKeagney.

On that day in January when winter finally decided to bite, the 12-foot red doors of the Fire Station Gallery gaped open. In its jaws, a yellow bathtub, half full of cloudy murk, sits almost fallow but for a motionless floral dress, stained with an indistinct darkness. This is the sculptural residue of Diviney’s performance, I,X,. A monitor shows Diviney entering an indistinct white space, wearing the aforementioned garb, and slowly immersing herself into the bath. Her knotted pink fingers pensively clutch a bar of soap, her lightly freckled face is stoic, and at the pace of a prayer, she scrubs the blackness permeating the lower half of her dress. A vulnerable intimacy laps gently with the bathwater that surrounds her before she rises up, twisting her dress into a weighty pouch. The water bellows, then drains from her with the intensity of impending labour – she is pregnant with defiance, the painful contractions of history palpable, as she repeats the motion. In this looping action, she is at once both embryonic and the birthing mother. As the object, her body, is powerful, she is autonomous; yet the shadowy stain remains, insolent in its clarity.

McKeagney’s sculptural series embodies notions of new materialism, conversing with geology and the primal impetus of finding a single ergonomically shaped rock on Killiney beach. A satisfying photographic triptych of hands clutching the kidney-shaped stone anchors her central sculpture. From an open birch ply box, three steel rods blossom white polymorph cradles. The central sprout elevates the naked ‘origin’ rock above the two ceramic homages to its left and right – one glossy black, the other a muted metallic gold. A further three ceramic iterations sees the artist interrogate the original granite form in speckled spritely yellow, turquoise and gentle pink glazes, each caressed to the wall in the foamy white polymorph like poisonous mushrooms to a tree. In rusts, mossy greens and sepia tones, McKeagney’s ‘Continues’ series comprises of square glass frames displaying pigments derived from coloured pebbles, also sourced from Killiney shores. Each offering resembles a map-like formation, playing with the elemental origins of her materials. The entire series has a warm tactility that only an artist who has developed a keen intimacy with her materials could achieve. It elevates the natural object, with each support mechanism feeling like an extension of the artist’s hand, asking us to reconsider all objects in the world around us. 

A small boy with a lone white balloon on a string stands watching as it dances in the breeze. The shadow of a young girl spills into the frame. Cut to darkness, as a terrifying clown appears from the shadows, asking us to play a game which serves as mode of narration for Heavey’s disturbing video assemblage, I’m Sorry I was Not Here (2018). Drenched in the sickly secondhand Americana of 1980s McDonalds and Coca Cola commercials, the soundscape contorts from advertising jingles (like “Can’t beat the real thing”) to the Angelus bells. A warped Catholic sex education video from the same era, shows a pious woman discussing slippery vaginas and using her fingers to illustrate sexual intercourse. Cut to a snowy woodland scene, then a philosophical sky. Heavney dexterously sutures religious and capitalist psychosexual preoccupations, creating a cacophonous savage that feverously claws at its own historic repression, spilling fresh and bloody truths. 

‘Lectus’ is an ambidextrous provocation, bearing both the hands of the artists it frames, and the hands of the state. Whether clutching a rock, a bar of soap or simulating sexual intercourse, these hands bear witness to a palpable residue, symptomatic of twentieth-century Ireland. Collectively these works ignite complex anthropocentric tensions, exorcising historic grievances as a form of cultural reflection, whilst elevating geological matter itself as a transcendental agent of change.

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

Feature Image:
Sarah Diviney I, X, 2018, live performance at MART Gallery, Dublin (10 January 2019); photograph by Seamus Travers, courtesy of MART Gallery.

Source

Wexford Arts Centre
14 January – 16 February 2019

Wexford-born emerging artist, Shane Keeling, recently graduated from the National College of Art & Design with an honours degree in Glass & Ceramics. As recipient of NCAD’s 2018 Ceramic Residency, Keeling has developed a new body of mixed-media works which aims to generate dialogue on mental health, suicide and the stigma surrounding these conversations. Curated by Lisa Byrne, Keeling’s solo exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre is not just about the art – the artworks presented are certainly not unremarkable, but perhaps more importantly, they provide a vehicle to explore the artist’s very timely concerns. 

Through the material processes of making, breaking, mending and remaking ceramic pots, Keeling seeks to initiate dialogue on the fragility of the human condition. Where many topical issues strive to be gender-neutral, Keeling has boldly chosen to represent a distinctly masculine thematic inquiry. The artist wants people to question why there are such negative connotations around mental health, particularly for men. This body of work is the fulfilment of his efforts to question why men seem to have labels of ‘dishonour’ attributed to them, with suggestions that they are “not man enough”, or that they should “man up”, whenever their mental health might become vulnerable.

Combining elements of ceramics, sculpture and painting, ‘BAD-MAN Oh Man’ features a series of wall-mounted mixed-media works, as well as several sculptural assemblages, presented on low plinths. A number of individual clay vessels and found objects also hang grimly from the ceiling, on thick black nooses. These images of isolation are contrasted with the mass confusion found in the central mixed-media sculpture, titled Man Oh Man. Here, the jagged pieces of broken ceramic pots have been combined to form a tall curving structure, calling to mind the shape of a question mark. Infused with barbed wire (that warns viewers not to get too close), this manifestation of ‘brokenness’ suggests internal conflict and perpetual suffering.  

Using the sgraffito technique, Keeling has etched into the surfaces of many of the artworks. Derived from the Italian word, graffiare (meaning ‘to scratch’), sgraffito is a decorative method which involves scratching through a surface to reveal a lower layer of a contrasting colour. In Keeling’s ceramic pieces, the surface has been scraped away to reveal Pop Art-style text and illustrations, calling to mind Grayson Perry’s ceramic vessels, such as The Existential Void (2012). These designs add an element of lightness and humour to the work – a satirical voice that highlights the futility of cutting off emotional contact with other people. Keeling’s use of the technique can also be interpreted as a metaphor for looking beyond a person’s happy façade, to see the sadness that often lingers just below the surface.

The British potter, Edmund de Waal, feels that ceramics are unlike any other artform. As humans, we know ceramics intimately; we handle them every day in our domestic lives, and they form the centre of our rituals. They are a constant and often ignored presence in our day-to-day existence. When you hold a piece of pottery in your hands, the story of its making begins to unfold. One thinks of the fact that few pots emerge from the kiln in perfect condition. Even if they seem flawless, there is no way of telling how they hold up to wear and tear – their strength is yet to be tested. Many seemingly flawed pots, with their uneven glazing, blisters and mending, have completeness and added value. A broken tea cup may no longer hold liquid, but could have a different purpose, such as holding coins or bits of jewellery. 

The process of harnessing the four primitive elements of the universe – fire, air, water and earth – and transforming them into something else, is both awe inspiring and magical. Keeling’s skill in ceramics is a reminder of the dramatic and transformative properties of clay. Through his use of broken and mended pots, he offers a small glimmer of hope of this same transformative power within all of us. Being broken is no badge of shame; rather it is instead a shining example of human capacity to endure, develop and change. 

Susan Edwards is a writer based in County Wexford and PhD candidate at NCAD.

Feature Image:
Shane Keeling, detail of Man Oh Man, Ceramic, Wire & Mixed Media, 217cm x 60cm x 90cm

Source

Galway Arts Centre 
11 January – 8 February 2019

‘Procession’ is a powerfully evocative exhibition by Limerick-based painter, Gerry Davis, which generates extensive narratives. In this respect, the work demonstrates how aesthetic experience transcends language. The exhibition comprises a new body of realist paintings that address timeless and contemporary issues pertaining to the function of art. Each painting poses questions about the nature of looking, as well as the interconnected roles of the artist, the viewer and the wider public. 

In some of the paintings, there is an atmosphere of solitude and depravation. For example, Studio Space 4 details a dated studio, which appears to be lacking in central heating, as evidenced by an electric heater. Some works contain depictions of other paintings within them, prompting us to look (and look again) at hidden details – like rat poison in the corner of a studio, or an easel standing precariously on two legs. Nevertheless, a degree of optimism does permeate this work; fire features as a recurring motif, harking to the primitive. At the most fundamental level, there is mark-making and pictorial space that continues to burn bright in the digital age.

Observation is another key theme that recurs throughout the exhibition. Generally, we do not know what Davis’s figures are looking at, but such propositions open avenues for critical discussion. For example, Observers shows three people on a low wooden platform staring at something in the sky. 

Similarly, the titular painting, Procession – in which many tiny figures climb a huge observation deck – shows how looking can be a social and communal act, with the hordes of people queuing indicating that there is something worth looking at. In Pulling Weeds we find a man thinning out the dead and useless parts of nature; the scene is both emotionally and philosophically charged, suggesting that the man is trying to get to the root of things, by deciphering what may or may not be important to him.

Most of the paintings present things out of their usual context: a solitary easel is depicted in the wilderness; an artist appears out of focus in the wild. A cross-section of plein air paintings and indoor studios appear to speak to the dialogical relationship between culture and nature, of which art is born. True to its title, a religiosity is present across the exhibition, creating charged atmospheres of uncertainty. Artist’s Talk shows the artist presenting in a Chapel, reflecting historical debates about the artist as ‘saviour’. This is juxtaposed with the stark isolation conveyed in a number of other pieces that clearly document the artist alone at work, in less than ideal circumstances. Such scenes are not new for Davis, whose previous body of work portrays empty artists’ workspaces. ‘Procession’ extends beyond the studio to encompass the extended communities that make up the art world, pointing to the idea that an artwork is ultimately completed by an audience. 

Some paintings are more personal than others. Still Life with Radio and Dole Letter is a beautifully rendered and haunting image which describes the personal cost and desolation of being a practising artist. EVA Baby depicts a baby in a pram, neglected in a dark and lonely place – a reference perhaps, to the many submissions an artist makes, in the hope of recognition. A sense of fear and apprehension accompanies each proposal, as an artwork breaks ties with its creator, to be judged in the world at large. 

Despite this, there is the feeling that a life of art is worth pursuing; regardless of self-doubt and personal sacrifices, the artist expresses a compulsion to remain on this journey. It is refreshing to find that Davis’ paintings are skilfully crafted and work well together as a coherent series. The artist makes a case for painting, based on what he expresses and also how he expresses it. Although this body of work is about being an artist, the beauty of it is that it is not self-obsessed – it is not personal confession parading as art. The exhibition speaks not just of its creator, but universally to all artists, all viewers and all people who wonder.

Colleen Fitzpatrick is an artist and writer based in Westport, County Mayo. She holds a PhD from NUIG in the Philosophy of Art and Culture. 

Feature Image:
Gerry Davis, ‘Procession’, installation view, Galway Arts Centre; photograph by Tom Flanagan, courtesy of the artist and Galway Arts Centre.

Source

Void, Derry
12 – 26 January 2019

Along the Grand Promenade of Derry’s City Walls stands an empty plinth, which became an empty plinth long before it was fashionable to be so. It is what remains of the monument to Governor George Walker, hero to Unionism, which for its atavistic sins was ‘blew up’ by the IRA in 1973. It’s said that hundreds of Bogsiders collected the far-flung debris as souvenirs of the war on triumphalist art. Where are all the bits of Governor Walker now?

An installation by artist Liam Crichton and musician Autumns (AKA Christian Donaghey), titled Stereo Object, enacts a symbolic séance on his remains, with particular interest in a kind of psycho-kinetic interpretation of sound within the built environment. Void’s main gallery is visually sparse, and all the more so for its great scale, with only a cathode-ray television sitting in the corner, permanently stuck in static. A handful of polaroid photographs are dotted here and there above eye-level, as if they don’t want to be seen: one is an unclothed male chest and right arm, with a black cross painted across the bicep; in another, a car is parked outside a boutique in the curvy international style. In this city, focusing attention on a car, parked inexplicably outside a building, is no innocent gesture. 

A wall text reading “NO WORDS” is set against a grey colour field, uneven and ragged at the edges, as though hastily rolled on just before you turned your gaze in its direction. This being Derry, these words are resonant with Willie Doherty’s early photographic works that were overlaid with text. Doherty employs the printed word to symbolically alienate images of demarcated territories, effecting a banality that is instructive in this case. If we were to take the press release at its word – that Crichton “[invokes] a presence of absence, or equally, the absence as presence” – then not only would these no-words-that-are-words or the no-statue-that-is-a-statue be anodyne, but our role as viewers would also be redundant. Falling somewhere between aphorism and cliché, it makes me think about Doherty’s film, At The End Of The Day (1994), and its acrid recitation of generic political apophthegms: “At the end of the day there’s no going back – There’s no going back to the past –There’s no future in the past”. Cliché can become a rich critical seam: it is a temporal artefact whose movement through time gives depth; it is a meme foregrounding originality; in this context, the banality of “NO WORDS” seems to radiate off the wall, texturising the soundscape.

A cluster of guitar amplifiers, with dimensions modelled on the Walker Memorial Plinth, is installed out of sight in a smaller antechamber, flooding the gallery with a sonic composition made by Autumns and Crichton. The music is constructed from field recordings taken around the memorial, which are sonically destroyed – thankfully not by a 100lb bomb, this time – and musically reconstructed with electronics, synths and percussion. 

It is difficult not to hear the clamour of an Apprentice Boys’ parade in the percussive patterns woven throughout the piece, and impossible not to discern the crackling of gunshots. The notes of sectarianism mingle with everyday highlights: a distant car alarm; wind crackling through a microphone; disembodied voices from the yellow-jacketed tour guides of Derry’s troubles-tourism economy.

I often observe, and share, the conceit of seeing art as a critical destination: the terminus where subjects are disgorged, naked and otherwise honest, ‘Telling truth to power!’, etcetera. This is why it’s tempting to see Stereo Object as such a destination, that the artist and institution have revealed quod erat demonstrandum, the cultural problem that rained upon the Bogside in smithereens. I know I’m supposed to hear these references to gunshots and marching bands and experience something remedial, but these sounds enter a space permeated with banality, and they are changed by it. 

The repetitious banalities of troubles-art are somehow elevated, perhaps illustrating how a ‘millennial’ generation of artists relate to the conflict. Where Doherty’s oeuvre exhibits immediacy – a despairing and lugubrious vision of a culture hollowing out – Stereo Object is the performance of the hollow that remains. It is a performance of our culture’s estrangement from the gravity of violence; the way shootings and bombings feel so distant, even if they happen right up the street. It’s why my Great Auntie Molly grabbed an empty pram and set about gathering as many pieces of Governor Walker, as could be manageably wheeled home.

Kevin Burns is an artist and writer based in Derry. 

Feature Image:
Liam Crichton with Autumns, Stereo Object, installation view, Void, Derry; image courtesy of Void

Source

Solstice Art Centre, Navan 
12 January – 1 March 2019

The exposé of Cambridge Analytica last year showed us how we are complicit in our own surveillance. It’s no longer just footage from omniscient CCTV that tracks us; self-authored social media data is also capable of being harvested, hacked or stolen. And thanks to unscrupulous but canny work of electioneers, the world now has Trump and Brexit to deal with. As the wordplay in the title suggests, the current exhibition at Solstice surveys surveillance-related art from multiple perspectives. 

The show originates from Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris – Ireland’s cultural outpost in Europe – and is curated by centre director and Belfast native Nora Hickey M’Sichili, who began the project at her family home, on discovering it was used as an ‘intelligence centre’ during WWII. It is The Troubles however, that provides the historical backbone to this show. 

Two large photographs by Willie Doherty from 1985 observe Derry with dry, ominous words as overlaid text, describing yet subverting the banal urban landscape. 20 years later, Donovan Wylie photographed the dismantling of army watch towers on the border, documenting landscapes once littered with the infrastructure of looking and listening. These stark images introduce the object but not the subject of surveillance – something which proves more elusive than should be expected across the entire show.

The banality of surveillance is evident in Colin Martin’s large photorealist painting of a canteen area at Facebook’s Dublin offices. Based on a snapshot taken on an open day, Martin’s intense detailing misdirects, as it discloses no secrets or dark revelations regarding the company’s guarded internal operations. The futility of revenge against our technological overlords is more apparent with Martin’s accompanying small painting of a child’s head, wired with EEG electrodes. 

This belied banality is a common thread. John Gerrard’s 24-hour simulation of a Google data farm may show some random industrial buildings, but they are made sinister by imagining what is inside. Roseanne Lynch’s photograph of an actual Google data farm off the M50 in Dublin may be static and analogue, but it is just as portentous. Conversely, Karl Burke’s Martian-like landscapes are digitally fabricated from computer virus code that was originally used, amongst other things, to disrupt Iranian enrichment centrifuges in 2010. The ones and zeros have been repurposed to map a virtual geography. Oddly, the prevention of nuclear annihilation has created barren post-apocalyptic landscapes; sublime contradictions abound in these human-free works. 

Alan Butler’s pizza-covered drone forms part of a mock-advertisement-cum-expo stand, promoting cryptography for children. It’s a mega-mix, where pop eats itself with extra pepperoni, flanked by an Amazon Books wish-list of a bomber from Boston. Digital traces are mocked here but are then manipulated back into a critical assemblage. The adjacent woven carpet by Jim Ricks reappropriates the Afghanistan tradition, begun during the Russian occupation, which incorporated military vehicles in carpet designs – upgraded now to deadly decorative drones.

With the human subject largely absent from the exhibition, Teresa Dillon’s cardboard CCTV cameras focus on a UV anti-bird gel as another incursion into urban life. But there are figures in Ian Wieczorek’s paintings and in Benjamin Gaulon’s hacked and not-so-closed CCTV footage, which shows how unaware we are of the open wireless networks watching us and how they can so easily be harnessed. Declan Clarke also provides some humans to surveil, in his 35-minute classic spy film drama. Here the gaze is gendered male, with the artist stalking a female researcher through galleries and streets. 

As a corollary, the female gaze fights back through artificial intelligence in Caroline Campbell’s research piece, in which an AI programme is taught to see the ‘wrong’ stuff – in this case, to ignore the faces of activists in the footage of protests at Shannon Airport. This resistance is complimented in Nina McGowan’s adjacent sculptural assemblage, which offers a conceptual route away from surveillance. A large ornamental pinecone stands in for a pineal gland, illuminated by an array of large surgical theatre lights. The pineal is being interrogated as the site of the soul, now a giant mechanical flower in bloom, as a spiritual form of resistance to the presence of all-pervading surveillance. 

Alan Phelan is an artist based in Dublin. 

Feature Image:
Alan Butler, Surprise Party Breath, 2015, Contents of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Amazon.com Wish-list, installation view, ‘Surveillé·e·s’, Solstice Arts Centre; photograph by Paul Gaffney, courtesy Solstice Arts Centre.

Source