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.

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

Pluck @ The Land of Zero

Cliodhna O’Riordan, Detail of Plaster & Custard Reaction II, 2014

Pluck projects are delighted to announce their participation in The Land of Zero at the Crawford Art Gallery launching on Thursday 27^th November at 18.00. At the invitation of Maud Cotter, Pluck’s contribution to this multi-layered project involves commissioning new work by invited artist Angela Fulcher and curating a selection of work from the CIT Crawford College of Art and Design MA:AP students. After the success of Pluck project’s debut presentation from the artist Stephanie Hough, this opportunity to work with some of the most respected figures in the Irish art world marks an exciting progression for these emergent curators.

Intervening in Cotter’s installation for her strand of The Land of Zero, Pluck has selected work that will develop its consideration of space, potential, and material. Angela Fulcher’s Traverse Frieze (Supple Lilac & Midnight Blue), is an installation that responds to the interior architectural space of the gallery. Traditionally a long stretch of sculpted ornamentation, this frieze highlights the aspects of the selected materials chosen for their particular sculptural qualities. The work from the MA:AP students expands on this. With her background in architecture, Cliodhna O’Riordan has an interest in thephysical properties of materials. In this new body of work, a hybrid solid is created by combining two seemingly incompatible ingredients: plaster and custard. Curious tensions are illustrated in subsequent testing, documentation and display. Brian Mac Domhnaill’s practice is informed by his background in archaeology, his photographs and videos suggest history but are ambiguous and evocative, resisting conclusions and leaving their narratives open. Eleanor Phillips works with the traditional practice of drawing the figure from life, meaning that the work reflects onthe physicality and presence of a human being, complicated through erasure and fragmentation. Vena Naskręcka works with the concept of prosthesis and orthoses. Examining how the body interacts with objects through a series of process-based interactions with material, this resultsin strange and stilted video works. Sarah Jayne Booth uses objects, images and video to explore her interest in femininity and the domestic. Working with a split-screen video, Booth doubles and layers close-up footageof hand and machine sewing to create an uncanny and creaturely visual world.

The Land of Zero is initiated by artist Maud Cotter to form a moment of assessment within Visual Art culture and in recognition of a new stream of emergent practices. The Land of Zero seminar will open discussion on artistic practice in the context of the dual forces of recession and the changing landscape of artistic production. It is a radical school within a school, a hybrid of research within showing, a two-day seminar set within a composite installation in process. It is a place of questioning and examination on a threshold between national and international practitioners, MA:AP graduates of CIT Cork College of Art and Design and the public realm.

Seminar: 21 – 22 Nov, Crawford Art Gallery

Exhibition: 24 Nov – 6 Dec, Crawford Art Gallery

www.thelandofzero.com
www.facebook.com/thelandofzero
www.instagram.com/thelandofzero

Stephanie Hough: In Pursuit of Leisure

Pluck are delighted to announce our first project. Launching on the 24th October in CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery will be Stephanie Hough’s debut solo exhibition In Pursuit of Leisure.  Hough’s work focuses on how society is warped in the prism of pop culture scrutinizing versions of recreation presented by the media . With typical wit and intelligence, Hough produces works that wryly dissect the culture of commodified leisure, creating an exhibition that is smart, funny and provocative.

http://www.stephaniehough.com/

Opening: 24th October 2014 @6pm
To be launched by Dr Ed Krčma

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication including a specially commissioned text by Dr Kerstin Fest and writings by curators Sarah Kelleher and Rachel Warriner and a statement by the artist.

Open: 24/10/14 – 15/11/14
Wednesday-Saturday 10-6