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The Visual Artists News Sheet, 2 Curved Street, Crumlin (2025)

04/12/2024

In Focus: Funding Case Studies | Disposal of Fullness : SHARON KELLY OUTLINES A NEW BODY OF WORK CREATED WITH AN ARTS COUNCIL OF NORTHERN IRELAND SIAP AWARD.

Over the past ten months, I have been developing a new body of work, supported by a Major Individual Award (SIAP) from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI). This award, given in recognition of contribution to creative life in Northern Ireland, is the highest value awarded to artists in Northern Ireland: £15,000. The award supported the purchase of materials, equipment, services, the buying of time for research, concentrated development, and the production of a body of work.

‘Disposal of Fullness’ was the phrase around which my ideas have evolved. The term references a process in dressmaking of easing or gathering in fabric as a way of adjusting or reducing garments. I have been interested in garment construction, patterns and sewing processes since a teenager in the 1970s, when dressmaking was still on the school curriculum. Over the last five years, it has reemerged both in imagery and construction processes, as I developed sculptural pieces exploring fragility and resilience of mind and body. Ideas embedded within ‘Disposal of Fullness’ relate to female experience, control and constraint, the older woman, and life experience – and of course, themes of fragility, perseverance and resilience are still paramount.

Sharon Kelly, Shell, 2024, wire, sewing pattern paper, mannequin arm, wax, 100 x 70 x 28 cm; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist.

This was an opportunity to undertake research in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where I explored historical costumes, past dress codes and behaviours – for example, how to handle and control the fullness of a skirt. During the development period, back in the studio, the work expanded organically and instinctively in various directions, connecting the drawing aspect of my practice with three-dimensional work. I tested drawing surfaces and processes, utilising drafting film and, crucially, began to use sewing pattern tissue paper. This old, yellowed and extremely fragile tissue paper became a significant medium with which I created an over-sized imaginary skirt shape by collaging pattern shapes, securing and bolstering them by overlapping and stitching.

I then ‘traced’ the outline of this large shape onto drafting film – a semi-transparent, but robust material. I used hand drawing and rulers to create lines and markings based on sewing pattern construction lines across this outline and, over a period of weeks, I added many more connecting lines, which populated the entire shape. The 2D work really benefitted from this crisscrossing of drawing and sewing processes; of tracing, cutting and altering shapes.

Related to these ideas, I created a set of female heads, based on drawings of women striking demure poses, painted in bold, flat, red gouache. With assistance from Seacourt Print workshop in Bangor, I developed screenprints of four of these for printing onto paper and textile. The textile prints were used in a sort of patchwork process to create an ‘upside down’ skirt, fixed with an embroidery hoop at one end and suspended from a fishing net.

The 3D work sprang from the research and development period and was based on plans of historical dress forms and written notes relating to the postures and bodily stances recommended for women in past eras. Several large skirt-like forms, around two metres in height, were fabricated from uncoated raw steel and ‘dressed’ with a veil of collage, using sewing pattern pieces or stiffened organdie, and stained using a Japanese tataki-zomé or ‘flower pounding’ technique, in which plant colour is transferred onto paper or fabric by hammering. I worked in the County Armagh countryside to collect wildflowers to stain lengths of organdie. I used my own body shape as a template to paint female shapes in sepia and red-toned ink onto the fabric used to dress the metal structures.

Sharon Kelly, Sack, 2024, screen printed nylon, thread, embroidery hoop, fishing net; 143 x 60 (diam) x 186 cm, Veils, 2024, stiffened organdie, ink, pencil, wooden rods, each 216 x 122 cm; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist.

Torso forms have been created from wire, Fosshape, a heat mouldable fabric, and wax – entirely new techniques for me. A set of used walking frames that have been drastically elongated, so as to render them useless, offer a myriad of possibilities for further development, display and presentation at some future point.

This body of work was led very much by instinct and feeling, tapping into ideas relating to women’s lives that are so often ‘put on hold’ or embedded in someone else’s story. The work also speaks to circumstances where life has taken its own path; where traces of experience stain or remain; where plans may have been imagined but never realised, or remain unfinished, unfulfilled.

The beauty of the sewing process is very much tied up with imagined potential, and a possible coming into being – a flat shape becoming a real object. I wanted the work to speak through the language of sewing and making. Threads are left hanging, imagined shapes are outlined, points of reference or landmarks are offered. Already marked, fragile, used paper has been mended and restored yet remains precarious, and all material choices are resonant.

Sharon Kelly is an Irish artist whose work encompasses drawing, painting, print, installation, sculpture and moving image. She is based at QSS Studios, Belfast, and County Armagh.

sharonkellyartist.com

Source

http://dlvr.it/TGZp8n

03/12/2024

Critique | Liane Lang ‘Deep Time Dip’: Butler Gallery

10 August – 29 September 2024

‘Deep Time Dip’ by Liane Lang at Butler Gallery in Kilkenny sees the artist present several bodies of previous work, giving the viewer an impression of the impetus behind her practice. Lang’s work is situated between sculpture and photography, using a variety of media to play with viewer subjectivity and contemporary society’s obsession with the image. Lang’s sculptures tell the story of their ‘objectness’, whether industrial or natural, and expand on relations with the body.

The majority of the gallery is occupied by Lang’s recent series, Touch Stone. Numerous found objects are displayed, each carrying an image superimposed on its form. Through these sculptures, Lang plays with representation and narrative to reference origin, identification, expression and a network of (human) associations, conjured by notions of the mimetic.

Liane Lang, Joan in Fragments, 2019, Scagliola, wood and mixed media; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and Butler Gallery.

Lang’s focus on the biography of objects highlights the narratives given to objects by humans, from utility to decoration, functionality to worship. Lang selects imagery loosely connected to each object, creating a story that involves humans in some way – something brought full circle by Lang’s merging of photography and objects. Images are perfectly blended into three-dimensional forms, so we cannot always ascertain where the photograph ends, and the object begins.

Australian anthropologist, Michael Taussig, once described the act of seeing a sunrise as actually touching the sunrise, because the ray of light travels into your eye, stimulating your retinal rods. “Contact and copy merge to become virtually identical, different moments of the one process of sensing; seeing something or hearing something is to be in contact with that something.”1

In Spitewinter Road (2024), a piece of tarmac road is imprinted with the image of a tarmac road. This duality means that the object is simultaneously both a piece of the road and a representation of it. This intelligent subversion reminds me of conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s seminal piece, One and Three Chairs (1965), in which a wooden chair is displayed alongside a photograph of the chair, and the dictionary definition of the word ‘chair’.

Liane Lang, Post Hole, 2024, fossil marble; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and Butler Gallery.

A similar kind of phenomenology is summoned by Digging Deep I (2024) – a found shovel that holds an image of a hole on its blade. Is this a hole that the shovel once dug? This idea that an object might display moments of its past leads me to wonder what would happen if I openly wore images of all the holes I have previously dug myself into.

Another hole appears in Shaft (2024), a circular piece of found steel with a borehole descending into blackness. A rope falls over and down into the hole with a hand reaching to grab it from above. This hole references the mine that the metal came from, pulled out by the same hand that later forged it into a circular piece of steel.

Crawlspace Can (2022) is a found aerosol can – flattened, rusty, and aged. Upon its surface are printed two bare feet, sticking out of a cave. In the Road (2024) holds an image that expertly turns a stone into a miniature grotto. Dark shading alludes to a cavity, inside which there are human legs and a hand, resting or hiding. This image projects a tenderness onto the stone, almost taking the form of a religious icon, or monument to shelter.

Liane Lang, ‘Deep Time Dip’, installation view, Butler Gallery; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and Butler Gallery.

Lang also displays photographs from an older body of work, Monumental Misconceptions, set in Memento Sculpture Park in Budapest, Hungary – a site that houses Soviet-era statues, toppled during the country’s transition to democracy. These tangible remnants of Hungary’s communist past include stone dioramas and large bronze figures of dictators, soldiers, and workers. Lang made a series of feminine interjections involving a life-size rubber model and body parts, which are strategically placed to interact with the solid and stern masculine statues. She subverts the celebration of size and strength in these monuments by showing them as brutal and ridiculous.

This witty and poetic questioning of political ideology, as represented by strong, virile men, continues to be relevant today. While ‘Deep Time Dip’ calls to attention the common theme of objectification and the female body, it’s also a provocation on how a female artist can embody and subvert objects directly.

Ella de Búrca is an Irish visual artist and Assistant Lecturer at NCAD.

elladeburca.com

1 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London: Routledge, 1993) p21.

Source

http://dlvr.it/TGYSLr

22/11/2024

Access | How Can the Irish Diaspora Participate in Ireland’s Visual Art Scene?: FRANK WASSER CONSULTS SOME ARTIST FRIENDS LIVING OUTSIDE OF IRELAND FOR THEIR RESPONSES TO THIS TIMELY PROVOCATION.

The day after I completed my MFA exhibition at NCAD in Dublin in 2012, I left Ireland – and I haven’t lived there full-time since. It wasn’t a decision I made lightly. Dublin is in my bones, as I was born and raised in the Liberties. The laughter of my friends, the warmth of family, the mingling scents of fresh fish on Meath Street with the earthy tang of hops from the Guinness factory – all of it fills me with a nostalgia and affection unlike anything else I know.

But at that time, the Irish art scene was a very different landscape to today. Studio spaces were nearly impossible to find, my work wasn’t being embraced, there was limited funding opportunities, and almost everyone I knew was flat broke. I was barely scraping by myself. The idea of sustaining an artistic practice in Dublin, while juggling non-existent exhibition opportunities, felt like an impossibility. Many of my fellow artists and friends decided to tough it out and stay, but for me, leaving became not just an option – it felt absolutely necessary.

Oisín Byrne, ‘smell the book’, installation view, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, Scotland, 31 August – 20 October 2024; photograph by Keith Hunter, courtesy of the artist.

Every day, without fail, the artist Joseph Noonan-Ganley would call me, brimming with enthusiasm, eager to concoct a plan to lure me to London. He and another other good friend, Sam Keogh, both immersed in their MFAs at Goldsmiths (alongside Elaine Reynolds and Eoghan Ryan at the time), were relentless in their efforts to convince me to join them. Eventually, fate intervened: on the very same day, I landed work with the artist Tino Sehgal and secured a residency in the Tate learning department. Yet, despite juggling these two opportunities, which soon grew to eight different jobs, I could barely scrape by in London. It was only through the camaraderie of my Irish friends, living together in a cramped flat, that we managed to ‘make it work.’ This became my Irish arts scene.

In response to the question of how the Irish diaspora can participate in the Irish visual arts scene – a provocation implying that the Irish diaspora bears a certain responsibility to engage with the Irish art scene, without fully considering the reasons why an artist might find themselves part of that diaspora in the first place – Joseph sheds some light on the complexities of that time, offering a glimpse into the dynamic challenges we faced: “The Irish visual arts scene is wherever Irish artists are working. You do not lose your Irishness when stepping over a national boundary. When I moved to England, I became more Irish. I had to rely on friends more, who were mostly Irish, for support: making bunkbeds, sharing rooms in flats, cooking together, making shows and publications. This intensified our bonds, which to others was seen as an intensification of Irishness. We’d get English people calling us the ‘Irish Mafia’, which is a symptom of colonialism, the conflation of being Irish with something to be scared of; something criminal and underhand – a threat to English control.”

Oisín Byrne, ‘smell the book’, installation view, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, Scotland, 31 August – 20 October 2024; photograph by Keith Hunter, courtesy of the artist.

Oisín Byrne, ‘smell the book’, installation view, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, Scotland, 31 August – 20 October 2024; photograph by Keith Hunter, courtesy of the artist.

Participation isn’t always something that can be seen or outwardly performed. Much of the support we, as artists, receive exists in the unseen – the quiet, unspoken gestures that often go unnoticed, yet are vital all the same. This kind of support operates beneath the surface, and it’s rarely recognised for what it truly is, though its impact is no less profound. Oisín Byrne, who also lives in London, told me: ‘I’m cautious of defining participation in any universal or goal-based way, or even in terms of visible outputs. It’s more intimate and developmental than that. We participate through late-night phone conversations, through copyediting each other’s texts, through travelling, when possible, to see each other’s shows – through friendship, support and interest in each other’s work. Participation is broad, fluid and indefinite, and sometimes less visible or public.”

Avril Coroon moved to London in 2017, also to attend the Goldsmiths MFA. Having just recently moved to Amsterdam to attend the Rijksacademie programme she told me: “My inclusion, when it comes around, is possible by access to facilities and structures, jobs and housing abroad. I participate in an Irish art scene partly because I am away. Moreover, I think if an art scene refers to a community and collective environment, we create it by facilitating each other wherever. Attending friends’ exhibitions is one thing, but what feels more ‘Irish’ in terms of chance encounters in a widening and quality scene has been participating in Hmn – a quarterly, London-based performance event that facilitates live testing of ideas, co-organised since 2015 by Irish artist Anne Tallentire and art writer Chris Fite-Wassilak. Frequently, and thankfully not exclusively, Irish artists contribute, forming a significant part of the audience that shares feedback and experience post events. Similarly, this year on a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, I engaged in a swell of exchanges with Irish artists of all disciplines. The Irish art scene doesn’t exist exclusively on physical land, struggling to make both work and rent, or within its galleries, but where there’s tables with good cheap wine and fresh bread.”

Leaving Ireland sharpened my awareness of the subtle class dynamics and broad assumptions about community within the Irish arts scene – forces that continue to unfold even now. At times, it seemed my practice was defined solely by the fact that I was in London, as if my geographic location mediated how I was perceived as an artist. Paradoxically, it was in London that I felt more connected to the Irish arts community than I ever did while living in Ireland. Yet, that sense of belonging didn’t stem from any shallow or sentimental nationalism. Instead, it emerged from relationships forged on much deeper, more resilient grounds – bonds built on shared values and experiences, far stronger than the flimsy foundations of national identity.

Dr Frank Wasser is an artist and writer based in Vienna and London. He teaches on the BA in Fine Art in Studio Practice and Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Wasser completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford in June 2024.

frankwasser.info

Source

http://dlvr.it/TGKX0C

18/11/2024

In Focus: Funding Case Studies | The KinShip Project : MARILYN LENNON AND SEAN TAYLOR PRESENT AN OVERVIEW OF THEIR DURATIONAL ARTWORK IN TRAMORE VALLEY PARK.

The KinShip project, like the concept it honours, attempts to expand the bounds of social art practice beyond human relationships to include the wider community of life in reciprocal, ethical connections. This durational artwork is situated in Tramore Valley Park – a 170-acre plot of land that, from 1964 to 2009, was used as a municipal landfill for Cork city. The area first opened up as a city park in 2015 before fully opening to the public in 2019. It’s a rich and complex public site that, in its own way, archives the excess of human intervention and consumption. Older Cork residents, who used to send their waste to ‘de dump’, walk over their own refuse histories on a stroll through the park. Either subconsciously or consciously, being in the park, with its ghostly reminders of the past, prompts us to confront our own actions, biases, and role in damaging habitats.

Year 1 Art & Design Students from Crawford College of Art & Design performance art workshop led by artist Marilyn Lennon, 2022; image © and courtesy LennonTaylor.

As a public space, Tramore Valley Park is managed by Cork City Council, who are engineering the substructure to support a new biodiverse habitat on top of three million tonnes of historical city waste. In her survey of ecological approaches to climate change and conservation, Emma Marris argues that many ecosystems are heavily altered by human activities and our approach to conservation should adapt to include concrete cities, brownfield, or toxic wastelands.1 For some, the involvement of artists commissioned to undertake a public art project which focuses on climate change in a remediated landfill site, may appear as greenwashing or ‘art washing’ damaged ecosystems. However, this view oversimplifies a highly complex situation that intersects a diverse array of interests, from local authorities to community leaders, multiple life forms, scientists, and engineers, and from people who occupy the park on a daily basis to national policymakers.

At play in the heart of KinShip are processes of creative and dialogical enquiry, and a broad interdisciplinary and collaborative effort to reshape thinking and decolonise our relationship with nature. One of the calls to action Donna Haraway makes in her writing is “staying with the trouble.” She encourages us to resist the temptation to retreat or disengage in the face of environmental crises. Instead, she calls for active participation and collective efforts to mitigate the damage, restore ecological balance, and build sustainable futures.2 This means acknowledging the complexity of the issues at hand and working within that complexity.

In late 2021, in partnership with Cork City Council, we won funding to initiate the project through Creative Ireland’s first Creative Climate Action Fund open call. The project has since engaged with a combination of artists, community groups, engineers, scientists, ecologists, architects, and educational institutes amongst others to confront the legacy of this municipal landfill through overlapping strands of creative enquiry (creativeireland.gov.ie). At the outset, under the funding call, the preferred participation in the work was with the public, but this has proved to be an unhelpful silo.

Leading the process has meant holding continuous dialogue, working consistently with a core working group of representatives in the city, as well as others who enter for shorter periods, to create an emergent and generative public artwork that includes multiple voices, tests, and provocations.

To date, a diverse range of activities and events have taken place as part of the KinShip public programme, including: A talk by Cork Beekeepers Association about the importance of pollinators and their work as beekeepers; The (Waste) Fibre Flows Laboratory, an interdisciplinary space examining our complex relationships with waste material, led by artist Collette Lewis; ‘Laboratory of Land Flags’, an exhibition of co-created flags made by local communities during workshops with artist Chelsea Canavan; Eco-Kite Festival and kitemaking workshop, led by artists Amna Walayat and Kim-Ling Morris; and Staying With the Trouble – a one-day symposium to showcase the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the input of diverse forms of knowledge in addressing rights of nature and climate action.

The KinShip Interspecies Flag, designed by local communities and artist Chelsea Canavan, 2023; image © and courtesy LennonTaylor.

We undertook to archive and map all aspects of the KinShip project as this facet is often invisible to those who are outside of a social art process. This documentation, titled ‘The Midden Chronicles’, archives all meetings, conversations, agreements, contestations, small decisions, and larger initiatives. In 2023, drawing on this archive, we created an artefact, The Midden Chronicles Map – a five by eight-metre map highlighting a few short months of the archive. It acts as both an artwork and a momentary reflective snapshot of the multifaceted and complex inter-relational nature of social art practice. The map is an illustration and visual record of the collective and contributory nature of all aspects of the project, and the effort given by all contributors, collaborators, and partners (lennontaylor.ie).

While ‘The Midden Chronicles’ archive contains material and ephemera that document the project, it also subtly reveals sets of values or assumptions, whether about the role of art, community involvement, or even practical discussions – for example, how much an artist or other should be paid. We may become aware through ongoing interactions that collaborators have brought different sets of values to the collaboration that weren’t initially obvious but could subsequently be addressed within the mechanisms of the project. These hidden economic, cultural, or ethical dynamics are revealed through the dialogical process, making the duration of the project not just about a specific context, but also about navigating the complexities of differing values, power relations, and goals within a collaborative framework.

The KinShip Art Project was initiated by LennonTaylor – a collaboration of Marilyn Lennon and Sean Taylor. The artists have worked together for over 15 years and were joint programme leaders of Ireland’s first MA programme in Social Practice and the Creative Environment (MA SPACE), which ran for ten years at Limerick School of Art and Design. In 2023 LennonTaylor received the Public Sector Award from Cork Environmental Forum for their work on the KinShip Project.

lennontaylor.ie

1 Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).

2 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin In The Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).

Source

http://dlvr.it/TGFVQ0

18/11/2024

Critique | Dermot Seymour ‘The Nine Primates of Ulster’: Kevin Kavanagh Gallery

12 September – 12 October 2024

Using wordplay to title his work, Dermot Seymour’s new exhibition, ‘The Nine Primates of Ulster’ at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery exchanges bishops with monkeys in a series of plaintive portraits of various simian types, named individually as the Primate of each county of Ulster. Seymour’s practice has consistently featured the physical and psychological landscapes that shape the North of Ireland and border counties, using wit and a sympathetic, bewildered eye for its contradictions and absurdities.

Reflecting on his career in an interview with Martin Mackin at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery last month, Seymour described the ‘north’ as a place where ordinariness provides cover for ‘hidden uncertainties’. He spoke affectionately about Monaghan where he lived for some years and which, like Cavan and Donegal, are part of Ulster but not part of ‘Northern Ireland’. For Monaghan people, who Seymour says, “talked like me,” the territory is blurred, sharing services, shopping, farms and employment in a continuous landscape. In a sequence of follies, the fictional ‘Nine Primates of Ulster’ bare no relation to extant diocesan boundaries which, in turn, pay no heed to county boundaries or the border. He dryly recounted how the first painting completed in the series, The Primate of Antrim (2023), which, when finished, reminded him of Ian Paisley, gave him the impetus to continue, initially to complete the 32 counties, but in the end, stopping at the nine of Ulster.

Dermot Seymour, The Primate of Fermanagh, 2023, oil on canvas, 50.8 x 60 cm; image courtesy of the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

In his introduction, Mackin describes a fundamental quality in Seymour’s work as its soulfulness. More than any other animal, even cows or dogs, monkeys have an uncanny human-like expressive range that Seymour captures well. This suits his painting technique that hovers in a narrow gap between realism and a tightly controlled painterliness. In ‘The Nine Primates of Ulster’ the likeness and details are exact, camouflaging intensely orchestrated brushwork. Except for the Primate of All Ireland (2024), each primate is presented in front of a filtered background that provides no sense of gravity or depth of field. This vacant airbrushed texture intensifies the focus on the primate and its remarkable human-like pose and expression.

The absurd cross-identification between monkeys and bishops begins a slippery slope into a bizarre unconscious musing of possible underlying narratives in each portrait, which admittedly, is an agreeable fiction. One can’t help feeling sympathy with the melancholic eyes and hunched shoulders of the Primates of Derry and Down, or to admire the rugged, heroic, Guevara-like portraits of the Primates of Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan. The Primate of Tyrone (2023) seems perplexed but earnest as he attempts a pained grin, while the Primate of Fermanagh (2023) stares out through an exhausted expression of sadness. The much larger canvas for the Primate of All Ireland has the unlikely looking oligarch prowling over a border landscape of tidy bright green upland fields, with a single peak at its centre. It changes the dynamic in the exhibition and is a reminder of the unyielding hierarchy of the Church.

Dermot Seymour, The Primate of Antrim, 2023, oil on canvas, 60 x 50.8 cm; image courtesy of the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

The premise of some correlation between monkeys and bishops remains unclear. Despite their ‘soulful’ expressions, the exhibition chills any anthropomorphic altruism and speaks more of the narcissistic human tendency to view the world and everything in it through the prism of human experience. It’s hard to tell if Seymour is challenging or reinforcing accepted notions of monkeys as devoid of autonomy and bishops as holders of authority. In the end, it doesn’t matter and is not important. In response to Mackin’s question about whether he is a political artist, he said: “I’m just presenting what I am walking through.” This ambiguous narrative has been articulated for many years in Seymour’s ‘bucolic’ landscapes with cows, sheep, helicopters, missiles and flags that camouflaged what he describes as decades of “hidden uncertainties, hidden contradictions and the hidden histories…underneath the paint…” In ‘The Nine Primates of Ulster’, he continues to leave everything open and unanswered with an abundance of humour and pictorial finesse.

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

Source

http://dlvr.it/TGFDp6

16/11/2024

Critique | ‘Thresholds to the Unseen’: Solstice Arts Centre

7 September – 1 November 2024

Travelling to Navan to visit Solstice Arts Centre, I am struck by the appropriate nature of the journey I am taking – venturing from the city to the countryside, crossing a divide of sorts. ‘Thresholds to the Unseen’ is a group exhibition featuring sculptural assemblage and installation works by Fiona Kerbey, Christopher McMullan, Joanne Reid, Katherine Sankey, and Emily Waszak, that contain reflections of the immediate landscape.

Upon entering the first of three interconnecting exhibition spaces, we are presented with Christopher McMullan’s Perfumer’s Organ (2023) – a walkway that stretches the length of the room. This is the only interactive piece of the exhibition and comprises a series of bellows under a wooden parapet that the visitor is encouraged to walk across. Each square releases scents particular to different parts of Ireland – ranging from wine gums from a newsagent to slurry from County Meath. This sensory walkway immediately engages the visitor, its library of aromas providing an entry point into the resonant themes of McMullan’s practice and the wider exhibition – in this instance, those of distillation, materiality, and sensory familiarity.

‘Thresholds to the Unseen’, installation view, September 2024; photograph by Lee Welch, courtesy of the artists and Solstice Arts Centre.

These themes continue in Gallery 2, with McMullan’s Muc Chaor (Pig Berry) (2023), which examines rewilding and cultivation via mounds of biochar (made from expired beehive frames) and aromatised compounds (including algae and rose) encased under glass bell-jars, which speculate on what Ireland may have smelled like prior to peat bogs. Katherine Sankey’s Hydrozomia (eden) (2024) combines raw, organic materials (namely tree branches and roots), connected via piping and electrical elements in a hybrid sculpture which explores natural environments and human intervention. Use is also made of the space beyond the windows, with Joanne Reid’s So Entangled (grey section) on display in the gallery courtyard, bringing the exhibition out into the elements and continuing the theme of thresholds.

[L-R]: Katherine Sankey, Craters and Hand Mine, 2023, 2x TVs with looped one-minute videos; Emily Waszak, We Speak Through Worlds, 2023, wood, textile, seaweed etched brass, wild clay, sound; Joanne Reid, Rest, 2024, powder coated steel, paper packaging, cast plaster; photograph by Lee Welch courtesy of the artists and Solstice Arts Centre.

Gallery 3 feels like a suitable climax in bringing together the different elements of the show. There are video and audio – elements absent from the other rooms – with Katherine Sankey’s dual pieces, Craters and Hand Mine. Emily Waszak’s We Speak Through Worlds is a large textile work made from waste fabric, hung from a wooden frame. This arrangement includes a bowl made from Irish clay and a reflective brass plate, while the accompanying soundscape, titled Grief Weaving Sound Piece, creates a reverential, almost spiritual atmosphere of contemplation.

As someone originally from the Irish countryside, I found it fascinating to engage with objects that create feelings of familiarity; many of the scents released in the first room brought an element of comfort too. I also enjoyed seeing the functionality of these familiar objects being transformed and elevated, as observed in Joanne Reid’s Ladder (for idle hours), in which a ladder’s vertical linearity is interrupted by meandering arrows. Fiona Kerbey’s Spoon is a salvaged shovel covered with antique lace, echoing the surface pattern of water erosion, and harking back to Lough Corrib, from where the shovel was retrieved.

Katherine Sankey, Hydrozomia (eden), 2024, installation of tree root, branches, wood, paint, plant matter, salvaged hairdresser chair, glass, electrical and plumbing components; photograph by Lee Welch, courtesy of the artist and Solstice Arts Centre.

Emily Waszak, Bodies, Jomon time, 2021-23, installation, assemblage of ritual objects (sacred ropes, terracott a sculptures, wild clay bowls, industrial waste, unused medical supplies) installation view, Solstice Arts Centre, September 2024; photograph by Lee Welch, courtesy of the artist and Solstice Arts Centre.

As discussed, the works displayed in ‘Thresholds to the Unseen’ are connected through an emphasis on materials, and through thematic inquiries linked to the environment, rural life, loss, ritual, memory, and a sense of place. The juxtaposition of found and salvaged objects with natural materials (such as clay, seaweed, or branches) and manmade or industrial materials (like copper piping, glass, or steel) felt jarring but also indicative of themes of rurality and the agricultural environment, where nature is controlled by machinery, in order to yield produce. At first glance, the artists seem to deal with quite different subject matter and in varying ways; however, through careful curation, their commonalities are highlighted to bring the visitor on a sensory journey, both personal and universal.

Laura Harvey-Graham is an editor, writer, current Co-Director of Basic Space, and Marketing and Communications Manager for Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI).

Source

http://dlvr.it/TGCzVt

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