The final issue of 2019 profiles a range of significant projects including: Dorothy Cross’s recent performative event, Heartship; Sinead McCann’s socially-engaged project, film and touring exhibition, The Trial; and Eimear Walshe’s recent commemorative project, commissioned by Roscommon County Council. In addition, Ailve McCormack visits current Turner Prize 2019 nominee, Tai Shani, in her studio at Gasworks, London.

Shifting our focus to the island of Syros in Greece, Christopher Steenson, reports on the site-specific sound residency, Sounding Paths 2019, which he attended in July, while Andrew Duggan discusses his presentation of unravel_rios at Eye’s Walk Digital Festival. In other festival profiles for this issue, Chris Clarke discusses his highlights from Middleborough Art Weekender 2019, and Sandra Corrigan Breathnach reports on ‘Somatic Distortion’, a two-day performance art event that took place across the town of Manorhamilton. 

This issue features a broad range of interesting columns, including reviews of two recently published books: Sarah Pierce looks at Reclaiming Artistic Research; while Astrid Newman offers an appraisal of Curating After the Global: Roadmaps for the Present. Skills Columns by Cornelius Browne and Fiona O’Dwyer outline the logistics of outdoor winter painting and bronze age casting techniques respectively. In addition, Matt Packer introduces a new series of columns, addressing the concept of internationalism within current curatorial discourse.

Following recent queries from VAI members about artist catalogues raisonnés and GDPR protocol, we invited contributions from Toby Treves (International Catalogue Raisonné Association), Carl Schmitz (Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association) and David Murphy (Data Protection Commission), who each offer a range of practical guidelines for artists on these subjects. 

The Regional Focus for this issue comes from County Wexford, with insights from Cow House Studios, Geordie Gallery, Wexford Arts Centre and Wexford Arts Office. Visual artists local to and originating from the Wexford region, such as Julia Dubsky, Aileen Murphy, Helen Gaynor and Nadia Corrdian also reflect on the evolution of their respective practices.

Reviewed in the Critique Supplement are Sarah Long at Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group; Joanne Boyle at Mermaid Arts Centre; Claire Halpin at Olivier Cornet Gallery; David Bickley at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre; and ‘Open Minds’ at Rua Red.

As ever, we also have details of upcoming VAI Lifelong Learning workshops, recent exhibiitons, public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.  

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Mermaid Arts Centre, Wicklow
13 September – 26 October 2019

Joanne Boyle’s solo exhibition at Mermaid Arts Centre can be viewed as a testing ground for her ideas around material processes and display. The exhibition comprises oil paintings and glazed porcelain pieces, reflecting Boyle’s attempts to “articulate the non-everyday occurrence alongside the everyday”. The idea of an exhibition as an installation is also evident. As Boris Groys observed in his essay ‘Politics of Installation’: “Today, there is no longer any ‘ontological’ difference between making art and displaying art. In the context of contemporary art, to make art is to show things as art.”¹

The exhibition articulates a preoccupation with the concept of ‘the object’, emphasising that paintings are also objects. When they are named and framed as ‘paintings’, they are read differently, in contrast to being seen as objects. Process emerges as the connecting thread between Boyle’s paintings and ceramic objects, while her use of materials is playful and process driven. In the ceramic pieces, gravity is allowed to do its work. The clay slumps and falls into place with little intervention. In the paintings, a muted palette emerges through the mixing of wet into wet paint. It all appears to happen very spontaneously. The quick handling of paint on canvas surfaces allows form to emerge. There are suggestions of mounds or hills – simple shapes that could allude to landscape. This motif is picked up strongly in the large painting, High Winged Woman, which shifts between a sheaf of hay or a small mountain. 

A series of delicate porcelain wands are placed on a table in front of this painting. The wands could be individual sheaves of hay, or perhaps a set of paintbrushes, saturated in the colours just used on the canvas. There is a nice open-endedness to the imagery here, while the connection of the ideas moving between painting and sculpture is clear. Boyle’s ceramic wands remind me of Manet’s 1880 painting of asparagus, whose form and quality continues to captivate viewers. His focus upon small areas, with a few deft brushstrokes, directs our focus as viewers to experience its power. There is similar precision of focus in Boyle’s ceramic wands, through her use of colour, as well as the simple modelling of form and display. 

The installation of the work also alludes to improvisation: one painting is tacked to a board and leans against a wall; another canvas is hung from the ceiling; while the ceramics are displayed as a series of test pieces, just out of the kiln. Each artwork is at play within the environment of the exhibition, rather than being enclosed in worlds of their own. The materiality of the ceramic pieces leads the viewer back to the paintings, to wonder at this relationship. The nature of the respective materials is explored, as well as the nature of form itself. On the whole, the exhibition appears to be testing out ideas ‘on the fly’; emerging possibilities and connections are invited through the display of the work. 

This juxtaposition of objects and materials, paintings and ceramics, make me consider the intrinsic nature of each. Medium specificity has started to lose its prevalence in contemporary critical debates surrounding art practice; arguably, it regularly goes in and out of fashion. However, the intrinsic qualities that both mediums inhabit shouldn’t be overlooked. The power of individual mediums is in the ideas brought to them by artists – they don’t necessarily need to be in dialogue with one other. Another recent trend in exhibition making is to frame painting as an auxiliary ‘player’, suggesting that painting is not enough to be considered on its own merit. Some argue that painting exists as part of a network of ideas and systems. However, it is still worth considering the intrinsic power of a medium, because to focus on a material or medium is to realise its infinite creative potential. 

Alison Pilkington is an artist based in Dublin who completed a practice-based PhD in NCAD in 2015. Her work is featured in the forthcoming exhibition, ‘Mountain Size’, which takes place at the Pineapple Black Gallery, Middlesbrough (1 – 30 November).

Notes
¹ Boris Groys, ‘Politics of Installation’, e-flux Journal #02, January 2009. 

Feature Image:
Joanne Boyle, Initiation, oil on linen, 60 × 60 cm; courtesy of the artist

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Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen
20 September 2019 (Culture Night)

David Ian Bickley’s latest film, Threads, was presented on Culture Night in a darkened studio space at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. In the small landing leading to this space, Three Candles was installed, comprising a prose piece and a video interview with local historian Gerald O’Brien, shown on a monitor with headphones. The story tells of a body lost in a river and located using folk-magic means. This tale was the inspiration for Threads, as well as the prose piece, a meandering stream of consciousness, presented on scrolls of paper, hanging in columns on two walls: “…Alive the thread, that runs like a river. Gently through this land of mind…”

I found this method of presentation somewhat problematic. Framing the entrance to the film screening with the display of supporting material seemed to influence my interpretation of the installation too rigidly. However, the presentation of this material does raise interesting questions regarding the importance of an artist’s intention behind their artworks, and how these may be read by an audience.  

Threads was screened on the back wall, while footage of rippling water was projected simultaneously on the floor of the space, reminiscent of rippling desert sand. The piece resonated anecdotally with Anita Groener’s exhibition, ‘The past is a foreign country’, being shown in Uillinn’s main gallery space. The surrounding context and viewpoint we bring with us can often colour how we view and interpret an artwork. The ability of an artist to mould the meaning we extract from their work can also be dependent on many external factors – from the site of installation, to events taking place in society.

Playing on a loop without titles or credits, Threads is open to multiple readings. The atmospheric unfolding of imagery in the film is achieved through soft, slow dissolves, echoing the fog and mist veiling many of the scenes. All of this footage seems to have been shot at night. The dominant motif running through the film is the moon – an orb that fades in and out of focus, moving on a trajectory from left to right across the screen, increasing and decreasing in size, waxing and waning. Another recurring image is that of a thin, bright pink, worn-looking rope, which cuts along the frame horizontally. I interpreted this sequence as referencing the encroachment of man-made systems on the natural world, including the choking of the world’s seas by plastic waste. This interpretation held resonance for me, given that the film was screened on the same day as the student-led Global Climate Strike, when young people around the world took to the streets to protest government inaction on climate catastrophe. 

The film soundtrack comprises an assemblage of natural sounds, against a constant backdrop of lapping water. An electronic drone soundscape swells and subsides, creating a vaguely ominous atmosphere. Apocalyptic readings of the work bring to mind Lars Von Trier’s melodrama, Melancholia (2011), in which a wealthy family holes up in a countryside mansion, waiting out their final days until the large planet Melancholia collides with Earth. Touching on the ‘uncanny valley’ effect – where artificial simulations look almost life-like – Threads has an unreal, luminescent quality. Something is not quite right, but it is difficult to identify what. 

The camera’s vantagepoint shifts from that of an individual, to one of a transcendental all-seeing eye. It moves slowly, snaking through reeds and grass, capturing the sparkling moonlight reflecting off the velvety, ultramarine water. Intermittently, the large silver moon dominates the screen; at other times, it is small and seen through a lattice of twigs and leaves. Rushes emerge from a dark background, an oozing, bubbling ground, with splashes of light and wisps of fog. Some frames seem to suggest that what is depicted is a model of some kind. There is deliberate play with scale, and it can be difficult to discern proportions, as things come in and out of focus, before disappearing into the mist. Threads works impressively as an immersive installation, with the combined sound and imagery producing a meditative, hypnotic effect on the viewer.

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

Feature Image:
David Ian Bickley, Threads (film still); courtesy of the artist

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Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group, Cork
12 September – 11 October 2019

Unsteadiness is a deliberate quality of Sarah Long’s work, recently exhibited at Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group in Cork. For this exhibition, titled ‘Kingdom’, Long presented five mixed-media works on canvas and one wire-based sculpture. Behind blotches of paint, the canvases lie host to trembling pencil lines, indexing a shakiness of either the hand or ground. Tremors would exit through the utensil either way, traveling between floor and body and, in Long’s show, right to the tip of the art objects themselves; as a viewer nears the glass case containing the wire sculpture, its thin ends quake with each approaching step. 

The encased piece is titled I’ve been silent for so long. The silence the wire proclaims – fugitively, breaking nothing – is indicative of Long’s interest in interfaces between the Irish landscape and the English language, and the literary history that embeds the two. Long’s textual references range from Yeats and other Romantic poets, to contemporary writers like Derek Mahon, whose poem, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, supplies two artwork titles in the show. One of these artworks, The world waltzing in its bowl of cloud, uses Arcadian purples and pinks; the titular work, Kingdom, incorporates glitter, indulging the colorful fantasies of the literary and artistic imagination, while simultaneously scratching them out.

Natural hedgerows are Long’s primary subject. The wire sculpture materialises the prickliness of hedgerows, its knotty lines and barbs poking in and out to form a warped honeycomb barrier. Like language, borders are another imposition on landscape. I’ve been silent for so long is Long’s first foray into sculpture, which she labels a ‘3D wire drawing’ – a term insisting on her sculpture practice’s lineage in her painterly background. It suggests lines being coaxed off the surface to intrude on the observers’ space, out in the open. Open space in Long’s paintings is anything but empty, with white canvas overrun by bands of delicate lines. Sometimes the lines coalesce into weeds and flowers, like sketches in a naturalist’s notebook. More often they run freely, filling works like Kingdom in a way that Long has compared to the population density that distinguished Romantic Ireland from counterparts in Scotland, rural England and Wales. With over eight million people in Ireland before the famine, there was simply less vacant territory. 

Working at West Cork Arts Centre last year, on the exhibition ‘Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger’, Long has incorporated this history into her research, showing us how landscape is ceaselessly written over. Through unsentimental shapes and lines, she renders the callousness – the hardening over – that characterises a landscape withstanding before, during and after famine. Testifying to this endurance, I can recall – Long’s ‘lyric poem’, presented as a wall text and de facto epigraph to the show – speaks to centuries of change witnessed by the natural world. It reads like an account of a long war, in which the lost are given a chance to tell their story beside the living paintings. 

In the third stanza, Long writes about “the last wolf of Ireland’s plangent cry at the hands of the old noll.” The last wild wolf in Ireland is thought to have been killed in 1786 along the Wexford-Carlow border – near, perhaps, the disused shed in Co. Wexford? The wolf had been killing sheep, so the hunter killed the wolf. Hunting reads like a motif in the show, with artworks like Kingdom incorporating the camouflage colours of a hunting blind. Art historians have often integrated British Geographer Jay Appleton’s theory of prospect-refuge¹ into theories of landscape, which suggests that the environment is something we scan from the perspective of both predator and prey. To hunt smartly, predators must empathise with prey; as such, empathy is not a neutral construct. In the context of environmental precarity, Long’s work finds more reciprocity in relationships of entanglement than in relationships of empathy. Unsteady is this new hand. The ship is rocking, down to the tip of each single gluey branch of wire. One footstep and the wire quakes; one stroke and the wolf is gone.

Frani O’Toole is a writer currently based in Cork. 

Notes
¹ See: Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London: John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 1975).

Feature Image:
Sarah Long, I’ve been silent for so long, 2019, 3D wire drawing, installation view; all images courtesy of the artist and Backwater Artists Group.

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