paper visual art journal –

A Q&A between Brendan Earley & Pádraic E. Moore following A Place Between at the RHA Gallery Dublin, 5 March – 29 April, 2012.

Brendan Earley: A Place Between (2011-12), felt tipped pen on paper, 9×5m; Image courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

Q1: The title of this exhibition evokes hinterlands, and perhaps even the abandoned building sites that characterise Dublin and other urbanised locations throughout Ireland at present. Does this preoccupation with transitional landscapes emerge from a desire to explore the possibility within uncertainty – and I don’t refer only to the current climate of economic uncertainty.

A: Well, from what I remember the title came out of a conversation with Pat Murphy (the Director of the R.H.A. Gallery, Dublin) early on in our discussions about what the show was going to look like. In the beginning there was going to be a lot more walls built, with a heavy emphasis on wandering around the gallery, but then I felt this was a little too contrived.

Apart from the obvious attraction one might have for ‘out of bounds’ areas found in places like the hinterlands of a city, the real interest I find is in their liminality. These are in-between spaces which naturally appear in cities and would happen anyway regardless of our obvious economic crisis. They lie idle and overgrown and in a semi-bucolic state, seeming to wait for something.  These places invite me in, not like a trespasser, but more like a visitor.  I think these places have a quality which stems from the fact that the labels ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ with which we normally find our bearings in a landscape do not apply.  It’s not the fields of farms but the Grand Canal beside my studio in Inchicore that are thick with wild flowers every year, for me this points to the ability of wildlife to survive in these waste lands. I really find this remarkable, nature’s persistence in the face of ceaseless change in urban areas. This gives me great hope too because I find it a bleak view to see the story of man/nature as nothing more then one of survival, with nature irrevocably opposed to man, forever just holding on. So looking at it in a more hopeful way, it is a story of co-existence, of how it is possible for the natural world to live alongside man, even in places destroyed because of our excess and greed. So for these reasons I have taken a more active interest in the possibility found in a built environment under a slow change, one that accepts uncertainty in order to develop organically.

Brendan Earley: Hunky Dory (2010), pen on photocopy and coloured paper, 29.5×20cm; Image courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

Q2: This exhibition evinces a shift in your practice in several ways.  In particular, some of the drawings include figures and you have begun to use colour in an almost expressive manner. I was interested to note that you had given these works names that referred – quite specifically – to song titles. There is also clearly a reference to Tarkovsky’s films. Can you give some insights into this?

A: I think finding fragments of things on my way to or from work and reuniting them in some way has always been a central preoccupation in my work. Lines from songs that one would hear have a similar feel to the detritus I use to begin a sculpture and they (the songs) would finish them. Indeed with this show, collage became important as it provided a handy antidote to my fear of the blank page (the large marker drawings are another way out) and they also allowed me to use colour in a looser way. As well as all sorts of other bits of ephemera which I find in those large DIY stores found on the periphery of cities.

Figures have begun to appear in the drawings mostly because I decided to make my interest in certain histories more explicit, such as land art, science fiction and the Romantic tradition. This can be seen as a way of mourning the devaluation of these histories (and in particular the latter), ways of seeing that I can never have. Artists who once, with fresh eyes, discovered sublime nature as a mirror of their soul and whose discovery is now obsolete. Hunky Dory is taken from an image of Robert Morris standing in front of one of his steam sculpture/environments. So the figures, although masked or half hidden belong to the past, but inhabit the present with me as ‘ghosts’. A bit like the shadows found in the reflections of the big wall.

This large structure was built for a number of reasons, as a screen hiding the large blue drawing (A Place Between) as you came into the main space. It also confronted you as a barrier would giving as little as possible away. But one of the great things with the silver foil faced on the far side was that it disappeared into the fabric of the building once you walked around to view it from the other side. Thereby turning the wall from something which kept you out to something which let you in. In some way I think you entered the gallery twice as your reflection in the mirrored surface of the wall actually placed you in the landscape of the exhibition. This inclusion marks a change in my practice, from drawings and objects and their potential relationship to debates in architecture and history, to a deeper need to understand the cost of progress in our built environment.

These concerns are beautifully voiced in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a glacial slow, almost event free film about landscape and longing. This is a film which lingers for long minutes over broken wastelands of abandoned industry encapsulating Tarkovsky’s interest in dereliction and decay, imbuing these broken landscapes with a terrible sense of threat. Largely unable to realise the alien properties of artifacts found in the book the film is based on, Tarkovsky projected the danger into architecture itself. Passive landscapes that could swallow a man. Tunnels which tear them to shreds. These effects were never demonstrated, but also never doubted, thanks to the tentative way actors explore their surroundings.

Brendan Earley: Wall (2012), silver backed plaster board and aluminium, 9×5m; Image courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

Q3: In many ways you might be considered a landscape artist and you have referred to yourself as this in the past.  This exhibition might itself be read as a kind of sprawling landscape that occupies the gallery space.  You obscure a view of the gallery so one must explore and investigate. You are surely interested in the idea that a viewer or visitor to the space has to negotiate the space and indeed, discover facets of the show for themselves?

A: I suppose the main paradigm I was taught was installation art – so all my work is considered in terms of the viewer’s role in relation to meaning found in the work, being an observer who ratifies the contract to allow meaning to appear. However this comes with certain conditions; it is not a passive role. Indeed this position runs parallel to me wondering what a contemporary landscape artist entails, if there is such a thing. I do feel we can no longer be the figure in a red coat resting on the stile as in 18th and 19th century Irish landscapes. As we pass through this land we most be more conscious, “to wander with purpose” as John Hutchinson (director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin) would put it. This sort of consciousness involves merger, or identification with one’s surroundings. Its antithesis, rational consciousness – the sort that produces Styrofoam and IKEA flat packs – requires a total separation from any sort of merger with nature. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. I am not my experiences, and so not really a part of the world around me. I am afraid the logical point of this world view is a feeling of total reification as Marx would point out: everything is an object, alien, not-me; an alienated thing in a world of other, equally meaningless things. Depressing, but I suspect it to be true, in some sort of way, of this rational ideology.

Q4: Your work evinces an interest with introducing abandoned detritus from the outside world into the studio and eventually the gallery. This process involves navigating the landscape near your home and studio in order to discover the rejectementa of society. Found components become integral to finished works. In many case, it seems that there is an almost alchemical process involved in your work. The found object is merely a starting point.

A: Yes, there is definitely a very real transformation in the objects, nothing is what it seems. The light Styrofoam becomes incredibly heavy once it’s cast into aluminum or bronze in the foundry, for instance A Million Years Later is well over 100 kg. For me the great thing about sculpture as I understand it is its power to reclaim objects for purpose. Not necessarily for a purpose but to give them an integrity, a weight if you pardon the pun. I don’t really see it as recycling, I am far too selective for that and I think for recycling to work one can’t be selective, but because I am driven by a desire to find purpose for the most trivial things I feel my wanderings are not in vain. Perhaps this is why I am driven to take even the most abject things such as a burnt bin I found outside my studio – it became the sculpture Solaris in the end. Again, like the Romantics of the nineteenth century, I would favour an open process and the fragmentary over systematic and concise, in order to be able to adjust the mind to a contradictory reality, rather then the other way around.

The only danger is this approach could be construed as some sort of romance with entropy. The places I visit are in no way a substitute for the official countryside and not to be cherished in their own right necessarily. I don’t want my work to be an excuse for the dereliction, the shoddiness and terrible wastefulness of much of our contemporary landscape. Discovering that the natural world is indifferent to the clutter and ugliness of our urban environment does not mean that we should be also. We should instead be trying to make our built-up areas more fruitful and life-giving for all inhabitants.

Brendan Earley: A Million Years Later (2011), bronze and silicon, 20×105x30; Image courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

Q5: There is a melancholic tone to much of your work but equally, there are optimistic aspects also and you have used the word redemptive in terms of your motivations for producing work. So, there is a balance between these two things.

A: Melancholic, perhaps but closer to redemption I hope. I tend to see such drawings as A Place Between as being more about investing energy then finding entropy. I am sure it’s all the drawings of Smithson that give people that impression but those large drawings are more life affirming than sapping.

With titles like Red Sky at Night giving a certain delight, I wanted this show to be sure and confident even if some of the sculptures appear anything but that. In some ways the very fact they hug the ground gives them the look of a collapsed object, but the transformation is closer to a sense of growth and possibility. Using such materials as Styrofoam, plaster board, plywood and foam, mixing up consumer goods and DIY materials points to a shared, global culture (Lying Awake in an Empty Building) but this does not mean it should be viewed as embracing homogeneity but more an acceptance of using what one has at hand and allowing for contradictions to emerge. Finding oneself in a place of in-between, finding form to accommodate the mess, to paraphrase Beckett.

http://brendanearley.com/

A long forgotten city in the sky

I was asked to write, in February of this year, about Tracy Hanna’s work at the Bullock Lane residency in Cavan town. I visited twice during this time. Since then two very forgettable memories from over a decade ago, when I was working as a young engineer, have re-appeared to me.

One of my first jobs after graduating in 1999 was as a junior design engineer with Banagher Concrete in Co. Offaly. I spent three months there before getting another job with the Irish Rail engineer’s section in Pearse Station, Dublin. At the time Banagher Concrete were casting, among many other things, two very large reinforced concrete fins. When you walked into their workshop / factory floor, it looked as if two huge shoulder blades from some extraordinary beast had been deposited there, amid the roar and dust. You can see these fins now if you look underneath either end of the Millenium Bridge, supporting it quietly as it spans between ‘The Italian Quarter’ and Temple Bar in Dublin.

For the brief period I spent in Banagher I rented a room in the house of one of the factory operatives. His wife would make me breakfast every day – cereal, toast, rashers, egg. The egg was always boiled and always grossly underdone, but I was far too gormless and polite to say anything, and would spoon a cursory few dollops of it into my mouth each morning, wince, and leave for work. In the evenings, I would go to the pub in town and read – then walk home, the mile or so out the dark, hedge-lined road to my temporary lodgings.

When I worked with Irish Rail, I was involved in maintenance, which in terms of engineering means constantly measuring the tracks (the ‘permanent way’) – to see if they were shifting. One particular job I was given during my time with Irish Rail was to oversee the marking out of the sides of the underground tunnel that links a section of the Dublin Connolly – Heuston line. The luminous arrows used as markings were fixed onto the side of the tunnel and were supposed to indicate the location of the nearest safety alcove in the tunnel wall – for those working on the track. One day when I was working in this dingy tunnel, a large diesel engine came through, passed us by, and, after a few moments a large, ponderous cloud of dark smoke billowed slowly up upon me. When I eventually opened my eyes I could see what I think one could describe as almost nothing. Then I coughed for many minutes.

Hanna was the first artist to avail of the new Bullock Lane residency in Cavan town. The residency is the initiative of and is run by The Arts Council with Cavan town and county councils. It is a brave and welcome addition to the growing number of visual art residency opportunities appearing in rural Ireland. And their assistance in Hanna’s work here was committed and crucial.

The Bullock Lane residency building was supposed to be a semi-detached pair of two-storey dwellings. The road directly in front of the residency building, Bullock Lane, is extremely steep. It runs down to a very narrow lane (barely wide enough for a car) where it joins Main St., across from an Eason’s.

I made one visit during the residency, then I returned a couple of weeks later for the experimental final exhibition / event of the residency – Do nothing till you hear from me. It featured a number of videos, video projections and sculptures that considered the building itself in an attentive manner. At one stage I spent some time upstairs looking out the front window at some apartments across the way. The top section of the window was ajar. Out of this section dangled a chunky sculpture made from screwed together pieces of timber. The shape was almost a decagon. There were ten sides, but it didn’t complete its loop; a sort of open decagon, or a decagon that doesn’t want to be one. It swayed clumsily over and back beside my head, softly knocking on the glass.

In the other upstairs room, earlier in the night, everyone who came – there were about thirty to forty people at the event – spent a very curious ten minutes in near darkness discussing this near darkness. Shiva Linga paintings, portals, space-time, sensation, etc. were also brought up, followed by silences. The room had been transformed into a sort of cave. The only light came from a series – two on one side, two on the other – of barely perceptible, egg-shaped slivers of light. The light from these slivers was that orange/yellow hew of the street lights outside. There was a smell of plywood in the room, and for a moment or two the world seemed smaller, or larger. I couldn’t say for sure.

Earlier again that night, Kate Strain (a curator) and Hanna in conversation, walked us around all of the other works on show, pausing to talk about them. At times Hanna would give responses from a scripted Q & A session that Strain had written. Sometimes, in this scripted session, her answers were simply “yes.” Other times they spoke naturally, and briefly about the works. One of the pieces on show was a projection of a mound of building rubble. The mound, in the video piece, had now been flipped around the horizontal, and it took on a sort of approximate oval shape – it seemed to hover forlornly, like a long forgotten city in the sky, trying to tell me things about its own re-making.

I had come across some of Hanna’s work before meeting her at this residency, her sculptural projection piece Hillwalker in the old Broadstone studio gallery, and again in the Douglas Hyde gallery in Dublin. More recently I saw her solo show A Day is a Room at The Dock in Carrick on Shannon. I called in late last year with my father, who is not a regular gallery goer. We navigated quietly around all of the sculptural / projection pieces, peering at the work and how it was presented in the darkened gallery space. He told me afterward, as we drove back to Longford, that he enjoyed the show. I am drawn toward work that people who are not in the business of art can enjoy, and can say so comfortably. I think it is because work like this wishes the viewer into it. The viewer is offered a space to extend into and play with the work, and this open-ness comes from generosity, and a sort of unspeakable precision that appeals directly to one’s movements and curiosity – a starting point that, for the viewer, is at once straightforward, fertile and exciting.

*

Ballyhaise House is about four kilometers outside Cavan Town. Hanna visited it during her residency, accompanied by a local historian called Michael Swords. She gave those who came to Do nothing till you hear from me a ‘goodie bag’ (envelope) holding a lovely collection of small photographs with exterior and interior shots of Ballyhaise House, and a short, clear text which had been written by her. The text relayed that the house was designed by an architect called Cassels. Apparently he designed Leinster House too, and that Cassels, according to Swords, had mentored the Irish architect who eventually designed the Oval Office in The White House in Washington D.C. Swords also brought Hanna on a tour of the Cavan town, where she learned:

- that the windows on the top of the Georgian front doorways were also used to throw light out onto the top steps leading up to the entrance.

- that the freemason’s hall on Farnham Street has been active since 1855, and that long before this a river had flowed where Farnham Street is now.

- that the old Cavan town center is where the Eason’s is now, and that there once was a bullring on the Main Street, where the butcher would bring out a beast before it was slaughtered and let dogs attack it so as to tenderise the meat.

The works on show during this end of residency evening showed a moment in a process. There was a short looping video piece of a torch-lit tree projected in the front room of the residency building. Alongside the projection was a small forest made from curved strips of plywood. These strips were wedged vertically between the floor and the suspended ceiling causing some of the ceiling tiles to pop up and out of their railings, revealing a furtive non-space between the tiles and the first floor. Another sculptural piece upstairs comprised a tube of thin white polythene spanning between two radiators, the hot air from the radiators inflating, and gathering the polythene into an uncertain, shallow arch. It split the room, and people had to navigate awkwardly under or over it.

There was another small video piece projected onto the reveals of one of the ground floor windows. It showed a hedge-lined road leading out of Cavan town, again, flipped on the horizontal like the mound piece, only here an absence was created giving us a sort of tunnel to a strangely recognisable world, or offering a route to another place of forgotten memory. The movement from sculpture to thwarted documentation to a mixture of the two spoke of the building itself, the steep lane outside, the apartment complex across they way, the enveloping town and its histories from below, the ruptures outward to the suburbs, and further to Ballyhaise House. All of these fragments were collected with a gentle curiosity and re-presented in an affecting way that offered brief moments of mystery to re-imagine into.

Adrian Duncan is a writer based in Dublin.

_______

All images courtesy of Tracy Hanna.

List of images:

1. Test 1 (Mound), installation shot, 2012

2. Test 9 (Oval), installation shot, 2012

3. Test 3 (Plastic Haircut), Test 4 (Plastic Tube), Test 5 (Undecagon) –detail, installation shot, 2012

4. Test 5 (Undecagon, with missing piece), installation shot, 2012

5. Test 1 & 2, installation shot, 2012

6. Ballyhaise House interior ( photograph from goodie bag), 2012

7. Test 6 (Polygon Tunnel), film still, 2012

8. Test 10 (plywood intervention) – 5, installation shot, 2012

Many thanks to Tracy Hanna, and Catriona O’Reilly of Cavan County Council.

www.tracy-hanna.com

Cavan County Council’s arts programme is supported by the Arts Council.

Ciarán Walsh’s latest exhibition at Pallas Projects consisted of a tripartite arrangement offering viewers disparate modes of experience via a collection of static visual material, a looped video, and a booklet. Presented under the rubric this brief visual pattern, its components comprised a complex and circuitous interweaving of images and text that not only provoked viewers with their unconventional narratives, but also tested their cognitive abilities.

Ciarán Walsh: It’s Just a Shadow Away, 2011, DVD duration: 9′30″ (looped); Image courtesy Pallas Projects and the artist.

In the gallery’s back room viewers were able to drift through the Image as it Appears (2010-11) – what amounted to a didactic presentation bereft of any labels or sheets of explanatory information – and parse the links and potential meanings posed by an assortment of old photographs, painted text, a geometrical structure, and some partially obscured watercolours. While the objects’ arrangement according to a colour coded system conferred museological underpinnings, other aspects contradicted such precepts. Visual and physical access to the artworks, for example, varied dramatically and their organisation intimated no timeline or other logical type of progression. Whereas some objects had been placed beneath glazing, others rested on top of it, and translucent white paper veiled two of the images. Pictures of an aboriginal bear costume, an ancient terracotta mask, and a diaphanous hooded figure represented diverse cultures and referenced a spectrum of practices that included primitive ritual, theatre, and investigations of paranormal phenomena. Similarly, the sole 3-dimensional component contributed to this evocation of transformative possibility and mystery. The portion of the form that should have projected laterally out into space from the edge of the table appeared to have been affected by a structural quirk. Instead, it gravitated downwards directly toward the floor.

Perusal of It’s Just a Shadow Away (2011), the work in the front room, tendered an equally enigmatic experience. This looped video projection depicts two actors performing scenes from Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a Russian film adaptation of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel of the same name. Set in the bleak surrounds of a production studio, the actors speak a language neither of them understands in an attempt to convey the emotional and psychological content of a story that features conversations between a man and a hallucination of his dead wife. Even for those familiar with this slow moving tale about the strange events on a space station, the work disorients. Walsh alternates performance excerpts with English translations of the Russian dialogue. While the format recalls the structure of a silent movie, viewers first stepping into its continuous pattern of play found it difficult to tell if the translations preceded or succeeded the actors’ scenes. Though ongoing observation eventually established the correct sequence and allowed me to modify my first impressions, I initially drew what I could from the sounds of the performers’ voices and their body language. Then, as the subjects’ predicament became more legible, it also assumed greater intensity. Moreover, key words and phrases stood out, particularly the brief repetition of a short clip in which Kris’ ex-wife Hari says “listen.”  In one sense the word represented an obvious contradiction as it implied listening to a language that I could not understand. But in another it functioned as an imperative that, reworded, could be understood as ‘pay attention’, a term that implied the use of more than one’s ears. Ultimately, recurrent viewings of this charged and awkward encounter failed to dispel the video’s haunting aura. I became preoccupied with all the ambiguities of the narrative. For a time I was stranded between states imaginary and real.

Ciarán Walsh: It’s Just a Shadow Away, 2011, DVD duration: 9′30″ (looped); Image courtesy Pallas Projects and the artist.

In essence, the publication no one can arrive in the past, before they depart from the future brackets the presentation. Released in the form of a pdf file in advance of the opening and a print version, it formed an introduction, became a component of the installation, and functions as a souvenir/reference that can be read and reread long after the exhibition’s closing. The content, which clearly mirrors themes evident in the gallery works, consists of edited correspondence between the artist, curator Pádraic E. Moore and Friedrich von Bose, a scientific assistant with the Department of European Ethnology. Though it is concise, the discussion touches upon a broad range of concerns. They range from the complicated position of museum objects and established conventions associated with their presentation to notions of time travel, abstract sound poetry, non-rational responses to artwork, unobservable phenomena, and the role of the audience. Of course, the gist of the discussion revolves about the ways we experience and translate works of art and other cultural artefacts. Not only do the correspondents convey a general sense of dissatisfaction with traditional modes of presentation, they also consider ways through which it may be possible to see back to the past or circumvent such conventions. In this respect Walsh’s stimulating gallery contributions offered viewers practical experience. He has reordered – or distorted – familiar structures as a means of destabilising our intellectual footing that we might discover previously unseen information and develop new elucidations from it.

John Gayer is a writer based in Dublin.

*This review was first published in Paper Visual Art Dublin Edition 1 last November, 2011.

Welcome to the neighbourhood is an invited international residency programme where five selected artists spend two weeks working and living in the local town of Askeaton, Co. Limerick. Now in its sixth year, this residency programme, co-ordinated by Askeaton Contemporary Arts and curated by Michele Horrigan, was developed from an initial desire to provide a centre for contemporary art outside of the urban environment, and to bring contemporary art to wider ‘non-art’ audiences.

Oswaldo Ruiz, video still, Askeaton, Co. Limerick, 2011; image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

There is no remit for the artists to create work in relation to the location of Askeaton, however, the participating artists in this latest edition have all chosen to do so, producing work in response to the direct environment, the local community history or the historical architecture of the town. The resulting output is exhibited at the end of the residency period in communal spaces around the town.

Influenced by the history of the Franciscan Friary and the practice of the order, Elaine Byrne’s film documents simple interventions she pursued with the friary’s ruined architecture. By placing green transparent vinyl screens against the window frames, she references the Franciscan monks belief that green was a contemplative colour. Historically, the monks cultivated a well-maintained grass lawn in the courtyard of the cloisters of the Abbey, which was regarded to instill pious reflection. Again this ideology is re-manifested as green fabric attached like curtains to the cloisters arches. Byrne has captured this sensitively on film; the gentle movement of the fabric casts a green hue onto the ground and surrounding stone walls, transforming the space.

Elaine Byrne, Franciscan Friary installation, green vinyl, wood, 2011; image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Next door, located amidst the wood veneers of a closed down hair salon, Oswaldo Ruiz’s film plays on a flat screen. Ruiz is a Mexican photographer and filmmaker who cites Seamus Heaney’s “Sweeney Astray” as the influence for this work. The poem is based upon the re-telling of the legend of the medieval King Suibhne who, having threatened Bishop Ronan, was cursed to behave like a bird and roam the Irish countryside as an exile.

In Ruiz’s film, he traverses the uninhabited urban spaces at night, shooting still images of the derelict and abandoned spaces around the town. Illuminated only by the streetlights, the cinematography of each seemingly banal scene is engrossing. Among local advertising notices stuck to the salon door, Ruiz also presents watercolour interpretations of the recounted tale.

Allan Hughes, video still, pillboxes, Askeaton, Co. Limerick, 2011; image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Located in the Civic Trust building, Belfast based artist Allan Hughes’ work considers moving image and aural methods of representation. For the residency, Hughes focused on the remaining pillboxes located in and around Askeaton. Pillboxes were strategic defense fortifications located along the Shannon estuary, designed as vantage points to monitor the river Shannon for German u-boats during World War II. Constructed from concrete, these could house up to two volunteers of the Local Defense Force (LDF) and the Local Security Force (LSF) appointed to keep look-out. Hughes interviewed three men from the locality about their experiences in the volunteer forces during the 1940’s. These conversations are replayed as an audio narrative from a speaker on a mount stand. Adjacent to this, a tv monitor shows alternating views of the River Shannon from the interiors of pillboxes, and is spliced with footage of its rough waters.  By recounting the experiences of the volunteers as two separate works, Hughes seems to comment on the fractured nature of historical narratives.

Alan Counihan, a sculptor who traditionally works with stonemasonry, enlisted the support of the local aerobord factory Kingspan to produce a site-specific work in response to the architecture of the ruined friary. Counihan carved a white plinth from aerobord, and installed it in the open courtyard of the friary, with a glass bell on top. The use of the lightweight, commonplace aerobord is a playful contrast to the fragility of the glass bell. The shape of the plinth echoes the formal Roman architecture of the cloisters arches, yet the durability of the sculptural materials negates their functionality in the open space – a possible indication towards the slow decay of the friary itself.

Amanda Gutiérrez, transcribed screenplay, Askeaton, Co. Limerick, 2011; Image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Chicago-based Mexican artist, Amanda Gutiérrez’s work looks at social, political and personal effects of migratory displacement. For this project she conducted separate conversations with four individuals from different native backgrounds who have settled in Askeaton. They are known only by their first names: Rita (India), Marianne (Denmark), JJ (Limerick), Raymond (England – of Nigerian parents). The conversations are transcribed into a screenplay, printed onto A4 sheets of paper, and pinned to the green felt notice board at the entrance of the local community hall.

Different categories within the screenplay parallel similar experiences of each of the individuals through their emigration, or immigration into the country. Under different headings – Labour, Interaction, Homesickness, Motherland – each participant describes their hometown. Departure describes their reasons for emigrating or immigrating, and Adaptation discusses their final assimilation into their adopted community.

On a small monitor in the corner of the entrance, anonymous hands type the accounts of each character. On the stage of the community hall, footage of the local countryside is projected onto a suspended screen. The screenplay, read by a local Askeaton resident, serves also as an accompaniment to the film.

Alan Counihan: aerobord, glass, installation, Friary, Askeaton, Co.Limerick; Image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

The different modes of presentation, and the format of a screenplay, converted to video raises questions as to whether the characters are in fact real or fictitious and if the emotions expressed in text and through audio are unique to these four individuals or represent a universal feeling of displaced people. The fact that we are never presented with their visual identities or that their original sentiments have been presented by a third party, mirrors the act of displacement and establishes their loss of identity through immigration.

I was impressed by the well-considered and resolved work featured in this edition of Welcome to the neighbourhood.  This residency provides an alternative model for a community art initiative where social engagement between the local community and the artists is achieved through other methods. The success stems from the artistic freedom given to artists, and through the community’s support and interaction with the artists to facilitate the production of the work, often providing the source material with which to begin a discourse. May it run and run.

Ruth Hogan is an Irish freelance curator based in London.

The title of this show, despite its apparent simplicity, goes a long way towards explaining what this body of work is about. Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds. It displays the relationship between symbol and sound more directly than orthography, and allows for an assessment of differences in pronunciation as well as the changes in pronunciation that take place naturally over time. Therefore, it provides the means for an examination of the processes behind language.

Jane Fogarty: PB15, (#1-16), 25kg skimcoat plaster, polybond, fungicidal solution, pigment; photo: Rachel McIntyre.

Jane Fogarty’s work is a visual representation of the processes behind painting.  In her own words, she is concerned with “exploring the ontology and materiality of the medium.”[1] Broadly speaking ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being. It asks what entities exist and how they can be related to each other within a hierarchy. In this exhibition, Fogarty’s study into the nature of painting goes to the very core of the medium and dissects its component parts. She dismantles the medium by separating the pigment and carrier from one another – their relationship becomes unsteady. By creating these sculptural layers of plaster, dusted with pure pigment, she allows “colour choices to be an entity in themselves, not to in anyway resemble the support they occupy.”

Jane Fogarty: PR108, (2/2), skimcoat plaster, pigment; photo: Rachel McIntyre.

The viewer is asked to reconsider his/her preconceived notions of painting and to consider it outside traditional associations. Objects are placed before the viewer in and of themselves; they are a product of their material and the time devoted to their creation, both physically and conceptually. Moreover, the sculptural nature of the work questions the idea of medium specificity. Consequently, Fogarty not only explores the medium, but also pushes the boundaries of the medium and the viewer’s concept of painting’s potential: “I call my work painting, but it often moves away from a flat plane and breaks into three-dimensional space, then becoming the language of sculpture.”

This progression from two-dimensions to three is best illustrated by a comparison with this show and Fogarty’s graduate show at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) in 2010 titled Twenty-four hours where 1,440 pieces of cardboard were painted with a distinct colour, each piece taking one minute to complete.  Although Twenty-four hours was also an examination of process, it was concerned with mental processes rather than material. The artist herself has said that this body of work was a consideration of the “time and reasoning used in creating a painting.” Through application of this strict methodology, the installation laid bare the mental processes that inform painting, and questioned the ideas of spontaneity and chance.

Jane Fogarty: Pillar, plaster, pigment, installation shot, 2011; photo: Rachel McIntyre.

In contrast, Fogarty’s |’pānti NG| takes the materiality of the medium as its starting point. As noted above, the medium is dismantled into its component parts – the carrier is represented by layers of skim coat plaster that have been dusted with pure pigment. The physicality of the medium is all; these objects grow from the floor and emerge from the ceiling in an almost organic manner. For Fogarty, the relationship between painting and sculpture is closer than ever before: “Painting today is an indefinable medium, I find its liberation very exciting.”

Rachel McIntyre lives and works in Dublin.

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[1] In conversation with the artist.

Barbara Knezevic: Temporary Equilibrium, helium, latex weather balloons, elastic bands, cotton string, brass eyelets, dimensions variable, 2010; image courtesy the artist.

In 1969, Samuel Beckett’s short play Breath made its debut in Kenneth Tynan’s bawdy revue Oh! Calcutta!. Infuriated by this staging, which ignored a typically specific set of stage instructions, Beckett withdrew the work and the play became a shadowy chapter in his back catalogue. This incident forms the crux of Barbara Knezevic’s recent exhibition at the Joinery, Breath and Other Shorts, in which a framed programme of Oh! Calcutta! is set beside an old  library copy of Breath and a red-bound book, entitled Beckett: an exercise in omission. This latter piece contains Knezevic’s account of Breath’s ill-fated debut. Inside, the text is facsimiled hundreds of times, each page a copy of the one before until its image fades and becomes skewed. A metaphor for the changes that occur when a work is re-staged, this piece establishes a thread for the rest of an exhibition which abounds with duplicates.

A case in point is A testament to bravery which consists of a stone set face-to-face with a duplicate fashioned from wax. A one-sided mirror, which reflects only the wax model, separates the two. With only the duplicate then being duplicated, the stone is rendered a self-contained entity by contrast. Hefty and squat, one is led to ponder the Herculean (if not Sisyphean) effort required to heave the stone into the gallery. In the adjoining space, a length of pine, sharpened at either end, balances precariously on a small bronze rest. The symmetrical form and exacting equilibrium of Forewarned is Forearmed echoes the doubling of the first work, as does the delicate tension of Temporary Equilibrium in the final room where two large balloons are tethered to the floor.

Barbara Knezevic: A testament to bravery, stone, microcrystalline wax, mirror, dimensions variable, 2010; image courtesy the artist.

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caption: Karla Black: Installation shot, Inverleith House, Edinburgh, 2009; image held here

Sorbus buddleia, larix kaempferi and liriodendron tulipifera… Walking past the exotic plants of Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens, I enter Inverleith House to reach Karla Black’s new exhibition titled Sculptures. From mounds of pastel powder to crumpled paper constructions and polythene hanging forms, Black’s abstract sculptures form a startling foil to the grand classical rooms. The first sculpture I encounter, Left Right, Left Right, has immediate and dramatic impact. At first it appears as if a pile of earth has been dropped into the gallery, bringing the Botanic Gardens indoors. This mass of soil, speckled with spray paint and powder, is barely contained by the large space it inhabits. Upon closer inspection, its seemingly haphazard form possesses carefully-composed edges and a delicately-patted down surface. The white pillars of Acceptance Changes Nothing similarly prompt a consideration of the work’s materiality. The scattered dust around its base suggests a composition of loose powder – how does it remain intact and upright? Black’s large-scale works edge into the corners of the room, obliging us to back up against walls and to carefully step around them so as not to disturb their fragile powder surfaces. By entering into a more physical relationship with the work than usual, in a gallery context, we are repositioned as participants rather than viewers.

Black works in situ, producing site-specific sculptures using impermanent materials such as toothpaste, vaseline and make-up. Ephemerality is not necessarily her aim. Instead, these substances are sought for “the energy, life and movement that they give.”[1] This deeply tactile exhibition, covered in drips, rips, rusts and stains, reveal a preoccupation with processes of pouring, mixing, melting and smearing. The surfaces produced invoke the body, often appearing skin-like. This is achieved through her so-called ‘domestic’ materials, those applied to or consumed by the body. For example, the pink fleshy tones of Concentrate On Capacity are rendered with cream foundation and concealer while pastel eyeshadow has been applied to the crumpled folds of Vanity Matters. Better, a floor-based sculpture, is a lumpy beige swirl laid out on the ground that consists of melted heartburn medication.[2]

caption: Karla Black: Acceptance Changes Nothing, Inverleith House, 2009; image held here

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