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.

Pluck@RHA Presents: Women, Artists and The Institution

Aideen Barry, Still from Enshrined, performative film, 2015. Copyright the artist

Pluck Projects are delighted to announce Pluck@RHA, a three year collaboration with the Royal Hibernian Academy as it approaches its 200th anniversary. Beginning with a conversation on Women, Artists and The Institution, this programme will consider the institution as a site of challenge, examining its inclusions and exclusions, how they shape what is considered to be art, and the ways in which these definitions have changed in our recent history.

For September 2020, we will be running the programme Women, Artists and The Institution

Feminist activism in the Irish art world has been a significant force since the 1980s when women artists mounted a challenge to the institutions that they felt had excluded them. Collectives such as the Women Artists’ Action Group argued that artists were not being recognized because of their gender by the museums and galleries that helped define Irish art in the popular imagination. Nearly forty years later, Abigail O’Brien, the first female president in the RHA’s almost 200 year history, reflected the ambitions of women’s artistic activism by foregrounding gender balance in her inaugural address. This echo is illustrative of the ways in which major institutions have absorbed activist demand into their own ways of thinking about themselves, leading them to instigate changes shaped by the challenges mounted against the establishment. In this series of seminars and screenings, Pluck Projects consider the legacies of the women’s movement in the Irish art world, and discuss not only the history of feminist challenge, but also how it has interacted with the interests and ambitions of artistic institutions.

The programme is as follows:

4 Sept 2020 18.00: 

Pluck Projects in conversation with Aideen Barry (ARHA), Pauline Cummins and Eithne Jordan (RHA).

This discussion will consider feminist practice, women’s artistic activism and the institution from the perspective of three key contemporary practitioners.

This event is free but you must register via eventbrite:  https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/pluck-projects-rha-gallery-tickets-118460280889?aff=ebdssbonlinesearch

7th – 13th September

Online film screening: Pauline Cummins – Becoming Beloved (1995) and selection of recent works

14th – 20th September

Online film screening: Aideen Barry – Not to be Known or Named (2015) and Enshrined (2016)

24 September, 18:00:

Dr Fionna Barber and Dr Tina Kinsella will consider a longer history of feminism in Irish art practice and the institutional landscape.

Vox Materia: performance by Vicky Langan

Thursday 15 November, 2018. Crawford Art Gallery.

Vicky Langan will present 3 performances in response to Alice Maher’s Vox Materia, in the library of the Crawford Art Gallery. Interacting physically with Vox Materia’s bronze elements and drawing on the ideas raised by the show, Langan will layer physical gesture with scraps of sound to create an intensely personal response to Maher’s work.

Artist’ Bio

Vicky Langan (b. 1986) is a Cork-based artist whose practice operates across several often overlapping fields, chiefly performance, sound, and film. Langan both embraces and projects vulnerability, offering an intimate territory loaded with personal symbolism and unguarded emotion. With a focus on the sounds of the body and its functions, involving contact-­miked skin, amplified breath and live electronic manipulation, Langan’s work sits between sound and performance art. Using simple raw materials such as domestic objects, hair and magnetic tape, she layers physical gestures and scraps of sound to create intensely personal imaginary landscapes. Mundane domesticity is explored as a temporal space where the material body and sensual inner worlds mesh. In opening herself emotionally, she creates warm yet discomforting rituals that at once embrace the viewer and remain resolutely private, exploring the limits of what can be shared between people and what must remain mysterious.

http://www.vickylangan.com/

Free event. Book your place at https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/vicky-langan-intimate-performance-in-response-to-alice-mahers-vox-materia-tickets-50478121420

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.

 

 

In Pursuit of Leisure: Stephanie Hough

CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery • 24 October – 15 November 2014

Photographs © Jedrzej Niezgoda 2014