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.