Rachel Fallon: The Mother City

Part of CONNECTION, Cork Midsummer Festival, 2022

Drawing on the figure of Mother Jones, a community organiser born in Cork, artist Rachel Fallon is creating a mobile glass house to consider the potential of ‘mothering’ as an activist strategy for reimagining community after Covid. These three eight-hour performances will take place in this purpose-built Glasshouse, taking the form of a conversation about care: with the first examining advice and support; the second, loss and hope; and the third, protest and repair. Each performance invites the people of Cork to have their voices heard, offering an optimistic forum for reimagining community.

Rachel Fallon is a visual artist whose work examines themes of motherhood, domesticity, and women’s relationship to society. Working across sculpture, drawing, photography and performance, her work explores the conflicts and ambivalences within familiar territories and the fragile boundaries of power and trust that exist in familial relationships. Recent projects include The Map, a collaboration between Rachel Fallon and Alice Maher at Rua Red, Tallaght. Her work is held in national and international collections, including the Collection of the Arts Council of Ireland, the National Museum of Ireland, the Wellcome Collection, and Goldsmiths Women’s Art Library.

Supported by the Arts Council and Cork City Council

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Pádraig Spillane + VEINS: Define Silver Lining (V2.0)

Part of CONNECTION, Cork Midsummer Festival, 2022

What happens when an online transaction is completed; when a mouse is pressed in positive confirmation, or a buy icon clicked to complete a purchase? What people, devices and systems are put into service? How do these things affect our senses? define silver lining (V2.0) presents a constellation of image, 3D works and soundscapes to speculate on new descriptions for living. This new installation searches the appearances, sounds, and infrastructures of our everyday networked world for what political theorist Mark Fisher calls post-capitalist desires, those new hopes for the future produced in the contemporary moment.

Pádraig Spillane works with photography, appropriation, and object- based assemblages to explore intersections of desire through imagery, anthropomorphic arrangements, and installation. His use of material considers gestural potentials and animations of various forms with works
performing as gatherings of disruption and appeal. Recent solo exhibitions: ‘define silver lining’, Queens Old Castle, Grand Parade, Cork (2021); ‘What Passes Between Us’, Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, (2017). Recent group exhibitions include, ‘Saturation’, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2022); ‘Silver-Tongued Seas’, Jupiter Woods, London, (2021); ART WORKS 2017’, VISUAL, Carlow. VEINS is a collaboration between Pádraig Spillane, Karen O’Doherty, Marc Rensing, and Fernando Cimino.

Supported by the Arts Council

Kate O’Shea & Siobhán Kavanagh: S.E.A. – Heart // Break

Part of CONNECTION, Cork Midsummer Festival, 2022

To donate to the artists go to https://www.patreon.com/Seaheartbreak?fan_landing=true

Occupying a city centre location, artist Kate O’Shea and vocal artist/composer Siobhán Kavanagh present an ambitious new visual artwork which invites the public into a performance space that combines live music, spoken word and visual performance. Exploring alternatives to a society that separates and seeks to dismantle community, it will also mark the launch of new music composed by Siobhán Kavanagh and John Linnane and a new text, poster work and song cycles by Dr. Ciaran Smyth of Vagabond Reviews and Kate O’Shea.

Kate O’Shea works with printmaking, large-scale installation, performance and publishing. Her collaborative practice builds spaces of solidarity to explore alternative modes of community and dialogue. S.E.A. – Heart // Break features fragments of her reflective process and is supported by the AIC Scheme Bursary Award 2021.

Siobhán Kavanagh has performed extensively as a vocal artist for over twenty years, exploring a range of vocal techniques and musical genres. Through experimental performance, Siobhán combines elements of performance art, costume and stage design. As a composer, Siobhán writes songs and experimental musical arrangements; working collaboratively with musicians and artists.

Kate O’Shea is funded by the Create: Artist in the Community Scheme Bursary Award 2021: Collaborative Arts and Community Development and Siobhán Kavanagh by the Arts Council Agility Award.

Colm Keady Tabbal: Inadmissable Presence

Part of CONNECTION, Cork Midsummer Festival, 2022

Artist Colm Keady Tabbal, who’s practice investigates forms of knowledge about sound and their relation to systems and infrastructures of control, presents new work combining sound, video projection and text which traces the history of sound masking technologies through their diverse applications; as an aid to sleep, focus, and productivity, as means of masking unwanted sounds, producing privacy in bureaucratic settings and as a technique of psychological warfare and an instrument of violence.

Colm Keady Tabbal is an artist based in Dublin. Their recent installations and performances include Through Walls (2021) Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Applied, Misapplied* (2021) Granary Building, NCAD, Dublin and Learning from Nothing/Forgetting Nothing (2020) Richmond St South, Dublin. Colm’s ongoing project Noise Architecture operates as a performative architectural firm, exploring theories of noise in relation to audio culture, urbanism and public policy.

Amna Walayat: In the Name of Shame

Part of CONNECTION, Cork Midsummer Festival, 2022

A new body of work by Amna Walayat that explores female embodiment and cultures of shame in the context of Ireland and Pakistan. According to Islamic tradition when a woman becomes pregnant, a paradise opens automatically under her feet. However, women and children often become victims of a “culture of shame”, with murder, exploitation and related violence common throughout the world. These new works draw on the narrative of the fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden to consider cultures of shame in a contemporary moment.

Amna Walayat is a Cork-based Pakistani-born emerging mixed media visual artist. Her current practice is based on traditional and neo-Indo-Persian Miniature painting, expressing her hybrid cultural experiences and her position as a migrant artist. Her work is currently included in the yearlong exhibition The Narrow Gate of Here and Now at IMMA (2021-2022), 191 RHA (Oct 2021) She has recently mounted her work in Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival in Chester Beatty and Mill Theatre (15-24 Oct) and a two-person show at LHQ (March 2021). Amna is working with Cork County Council as a Creative Producer in residence supported by Creative Ireland.

Alice Maher: Vox Materia

Pluck Projects are delighted to announce Vox Materia by Alice Maher at the Source Arts Centre, Thurles, Tipperary, opening on the 29th March, 2018.

Vox Materia comprises a multi-part installation of sculpture and works on paper. Stemming from Maher’s consideration of a 12th Century mermaid carving at nearby Kilcooley Abbey, this show meditates on voice and silence. The mermaid is a hybrid creature that transgresses boundaries between human and animal, and is often associated with traumatic loss of voice. Maher deploys the mermaid not as a motif, but as an ambiguous and powerful conceptual tool to explore ideas of language, embodiment, agency, and autonomy. The artist begins by adopting and documenting contorted postures; creating strained silhouettes that gesture towards a language of the body in extremis. Vox Materia exploits the tactile, contingent qualities of wood relief print and watercolour to articulate amoebic, inter-elementary forms while a series of hand-held sculptural forms create new material and corporeal vocabularies.

Alice Maher is one of Ireland’s leading artists who has produced iconic work in film, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Since her first major solo exhibition in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1994 and her representation of Ireland at the Sao Paolo Bienniale in the same year, she has held major shows in IMMA, the RHA, The David Nolan Gallery, New York, the Brighton and Hove Museums and Purdy Hicks, London among many others. Her work is held in Irish and international collections including the Neuberger Museum, New York, the Hammond Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MoMA, New York, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the British Museum, London and the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris. She is a member of Aosdána.

The exhibition at the Source Arts Centre  will be followed by its installation at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork later this year. These locations are not only important cultural sites in themselves, but also are significant to the artist. Maher is a Tipperary native; she was born there in 1956 and grew up in a rural part of the county in Kilmoyler, near Bansha. In her 20s Maher enrolled in night classes in what was then the Crawford Municipal College of Art, studying drawing in the upstairs rooms which will host the exhibition of her work later this year. She enrolled full time in the undergraduate course from 1981 until 1985 marking the start of her career as an artist. Therefore, the resonances of this exhibition are not only thematic but also biographical and professional.

Vox Materia runs at the Source Arts Centre until the 5th May, 2018 and will move to the Crawford Art Gallery in September 2018.

The work in this exhibition has been made possible through funding from Tipperary County Council and Creative Ireland Program and was commissioned by Brendan Maher at the Source Arts Centre, Thurles. It is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue which includes essays by the curators and by artist and writer Dr Austin McQuinn.

 

 

Architecture/Sculpture: Work by Graduates of Cork Centre for Architectural Education

Preview: January 31, 18:00, Boole Library, UCC.
To be opened by Dr Sabine Kriebel, History of Art, UCC and Jason O’Shaughnessy, Cork Centre for Architectural Education.

PLUCK PROJECTS are pleased to announce their forthcoming show Architecture/Sculpture at the Boole Library, UCC. Working with Jason O’Shaughnessy and Dr Eve Olney along with their Master of Architecture (MArch) Graduates from Cork Centre for Architectural Education (UCC/CIT), Pluck will showcase a selection of models and constructions, originally made as part of larger designs for proposed buildings.  By removing them from their context, this show instead asks the viewer to consider the affinities between model and sculptural object.  Abstract forms manifest graduates’ inventive designs, implying the atmosphere and impression of a concept, rather than the more conventional tendency of directly illustrating plans.

The work from which these models are taken was conceived in response to the brief Athens_Endless [C]ity in 2015/2016, undertaken as part of the M.Arch program. This innovative course asks students to interrogate ideas about the built environment, creating responses that consider buildings as social spaces that are lived, impacting communities and introducing new concepts into society. From this theoretical framing, exciting prospects are envisaged that address social and political questions, challenging the ways in which we are directed to live by conventional spaces, and proposing alternatives that positively impact those who inhabit them. The graduates of this programme are given the tools needed to contribute to some of Ireland’s most celebrated architectural firms, with alumni working for some of the most renowned architectural practices in Ireland and abroad. Graduates from the Programme are multiple award winners, and have recently won the inaugural “RIAI Scott Tallon Walker Student Excellence Award” in Architecture, the “RIAI Thesis Writing Prize”, the IDI “Sustainable Design Award” for Architecture”, and the “European Association for Architectural Education Prize (EAAE) Prize for Innovation in Architecture”.

In Architecture/Sculpture, Pluck celebrate the conceptual drive of the M.Arch programme, foregrounding the creativity of graduates, their ability to mediate between critical discourse and their attention to form and structure. With these intriguing objects; some that explicitly reference building and some that explore more abstract concepts of texture or shape;  an often neglected aspect of how our built environment is conceived comes to the fore. Architecture/Sculpture presents viewers with objects that act as architectural sketches, putting the ideas behind buildings on show.

With work by Gillian O’Keeffe, Chloe Kerins, Habban Ali, Claire Quinn, Stephen Hannon  and Danielle O’Sullivan, and Catriona Courtney.

With thanks to Crónán Ó Doibhlin, Head of Research Collections and Communications, Boole Library, University College Cork.

Gaolbreak: Angela Fulcher

January 28 – February 25, Mon-Fri 09:00 – 17:00.

Preview: January 27, 18.00. Catalogue launch and drinks reception.

In November 1923, prisoners held at Cork City Women’s Gaol launched an escape attempt. Tying together bed sheets to construct a rope ladder, the prisoners descended from the walls of the prison and made their bid for freedom. In Gaolbreak, Cork-based artist Angela Fulcher draws on this history to create a large scale fabric installation in the atrium of Cork City Hall. Knotted lengths of bedding fall from the building’s balconies, obliquely referencing this story of revolt in recognition of Ireland’s Decade of Commemorations. Fulcher brings to bear her fascination with the world of consumer-driven textile design, using contemporary items from low-cost suppliers like Michael Guineys and Penneys. Using sometimes kitsch, heavily patterned material, Fulcher looks beyond the garish to consider prospective connections between everyday devalued materials and their extraordinary potentials.

This project builds on Fulcher’s substantial body of work which has led to growing recognition of her practice. Paying close attention to the details and qualities of materials and surfaces, Fulcher explores the contexts and philosophies associated found materials. Her intelligent and subtle subversions touch on the histories and politics of manufacturing, fashion and obsolescence, the vagaries of taste and the realm of traditional feminine making. Fulcher takes a unique approach to sculpture. Her recent practice has involved creating large-scale, temporary textile sculptures that engage their environment: Sun Stopping at VISUAL, Carlow (2016) reflected on its site, creating striking interventions outside the gallery; Vermiculated Render Quoins to Ground Floor (2016) at the Engage Festival Bandon echoed the patterns on the Allin centre’s walls, translating them into textile sculptures of heavily patterned upholstery fabric and red pleather. Creating surprising, intelligent and witty works of art, Fulcher scrutinizes our everyday environment, picking out derided artefacts in order to consider their implications.

Curated by Pluck Projects

Catalogue with essay by Prof. Jessica Hemmings, Professor of Crafts & Vice-Prefekt of Research at the Academy of Design & Crafts (HDK), University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Funded by Cork City Council. Angela  Fulcher is a recipient of the Next Generation Bursary Award 2016, a special initiative of the Arts Council and the Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme, in recognition of the role of artists in the events of 1916.

In Pursuit of Leisure: Stephanie Hough

CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery • 24 October – 15 November 2014

Photographs © Jedrzej Niezgoda 2014

New Work from Glasgow

Pluck Projects is pleased to present this exhibition of work from Glasgow School of Art students and alumni. Discomfiting shapes, lurid colours, twisting light and stuttering, disjunctive video interact in installation, film and sculpture. This is eclectic work characterized by an unsettling, visceral approach to materiality. Set in UCC’s old Anatomy Theatre, this exhibition platforms the best of the vibrant and exciting visual art currently being produced by one of the UK’s leading art schools.

Drawing on the connection between Scotland’s second city and Ireland’s, this project brings future stars from this world-leading school to Cork. Comprised of work selected by Pluck, New Work from Glasgow presents the work of six exceptional artists at the start of their careers.

Featured artists: Paul Deslandes, Christabel Geary, Will Kendrick, Heather Lander, James McCann, Sara Moustafa.

Kindly supported by Cork City Council and University College Cork