A ludicrous and inventive interpretation of the Brontë myth, taking the real and imaginary worlds of the Yorkshire siblings as inspiration. With only a handful of props, two performers deconstruct not only gothic themes of love, madness and revenge, but also themselves.
For details of performances in the Cairns Lecture Theatre, Summerhall: festival16.summerhall.co.uk/event/we-are-bronte/
The Subject and Me tells the story of the turbulent events that shaped Alice Neel’s life, through a retrospective of drawings and selection of late paintings. Emphasising the psychological perception that would allow Neel (1900-1984) to produce some of the most striking and resonant portraits of the twentieth century, the exhibition offers candid observations of sexuality, family, childhood, pain and poverty. It is also an important subjective document of life in post-war America.
Associating with Andy Warhol and the Beat Generation, Neel tended to exist on the peripheries of society. Now seen from a contemporary perspective, when human interaction becomes increasingly mediated, her work seems able to be able to open up a direct and accessible conversation about what happens when one person encounters another. Against a tendency in much of the celebrated art of the last century, to remove the messiness of human existence, Neel’s work seems to strive for a more embracing world-view. To borrow from one of Neel’s close friends, poet Kenneth Fearing, the portraits seem to say: “I forgive you, to put it simply, for being alive, and pardon you, in short, for being you”.
The University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery is delighted to present The Subject and Me, the first solo exhibition Alice Neel in Scotland. It constitutes the latest in a series promoting the work of leading women artists, previously including Jane and Louise Wilson, Hanne Darboven, Jenny Holzer and Rosemarie Trockel.
29 July – 8 October 2016, Talbot Rice Gallery
Connolly’s practice encompasses process based sculptural works, objects and performative events both inside and outside the gallery space. In his most recent series of works the Belfast based artist distills across varying scales the causes and affects of risk and uncertainty that occur at the fragile interface of humans and nature.
As the present exhibition sets out to expose, this fragility and uncertainty is nowhere more disturbingly encountered than in the process of ‘geological fracturing’ for the purpose of extracting gas. Exhibition works such as ‘Fence Diagram’, ‘Fractured Landscape’, ‘Complex Studio Landscapes’ and ‘Fracture’ dramatize how pressurized liquid pollutants might travel, and pose a threat, to rock strata, water aquifers and surface life-forms exposed to its unpredictable affects. Both a meditation on the artist’s own experience of fracking, which threatened his home county of North Antrim, and a timely warning against unbridled quasi-scientific confidence in its safety – Connolly’s exhibition re-enacts and embodies the unpredictability and risk immanent to the fracking process.
The project is informed by independent scientific studies of Fracking sourced at Duke, Stanford and Durham Universities and links up with local communities affected by the plans for fracking in the North West Carboniferous Basin of Leitrim, Fermanagh and Cavan including the local ‘LOVE LEITRIM’ campaigners. In addition, Connolly has granted part of the gallery space to the Young Friends of the Earth campaigners from Dublin who, along with the artist and Love Leitrim, are trying to raise awareness about the potential risks of chemical fracking and its incompatibility with the community of life forms it comes in to contact with.
Exhibition continues at Leitrim Sculpture Workshop until Thursday 18th August.
Number ten in the 2015 series of interviews from the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Eclectrc Panoptic teases back layers of cognition, reflecting New Zealand born artist Johnson’s interest in science fiction, alternative universes and the slippery nature of perception and reality.
Comprised of a suite of drawings, tessellating patterns and virtual reality technology, the exhibition becomes a bridging portal into another realm. The installation takes its genesis from the psychomagic group rituals conceived by the visionary filmmaker and comic book writer Alejandro Jodorowsky; and the technological themes of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel ‘Dune’. Concealed within the space is ‘Ixian Gate’, a virtual reality artwork that can only be experienced through an Oculus Rift headset, plunging participants into the dystopic world of her drawings.
29 July – 8 October 2016, Talbot Rice Gallery
I Went to the Woods looks at how artists have experienced and portrayed their surroundings in the course of walks, journeys and aimless wanderings. Featuring works by Irish and international artists, the exhibition explores the artist as a drifter, nomad, and traveller, who captures the external environment through the careful observation of their surroundings and the collection of materials, objects and images.
In this way, the artists in I Went to the Woods epitomise a sense of rugged individualism and romantic idealism, a worldview expressed in Henry David Thoreau’s statement that gives its title to the exhibition: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
An extensive programme of curated events, performances, lectures, and educational activities takes place at the Glucksman during the exhibition run.
The exhibition has been supported by The Arts Council of Ireland, Danish Arts Foundation, Embassy of Denmark, Ireland, the Flemish Agency for Art and Heritage and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation.
Artists: Anna Bak, Brendan Earley, Fiona Kelly, Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen, Richard Long, Helen Mirra, Ria Pacquée, herman de vries, Walker & Walker.
23 July – 6 November 2016, Lewis Glucksman Gallery
Ninth in the current series of interviews with authors at the 2015 Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Irish-born photographer Enda Bowe’s work is concerned with story telling and the search for light and beauty in the ordinary. He is based in London and his first
book Kilburn Cherry has recently been published by J&J Books. At Mirrored River was inspired by the Gaelic word Teannalach (pron. “channah-lack”) which means awareness. In particular, it is awareness of that which is intangible and hushed; of being aware of the quietness and presence of people, places and nature. With this in mind, I sought to capture the teannalach of stories and dreams within a singular town.
02 July – 16 October, Visual Carlow
Latest in the 2015 WriterStories TV series from the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
A’ the Airts, the Crawick Multiverse and MERZ Gallery in Sanquhar recently hosted a conversation between Jeffrey Hoffman and Charles Jencks as part of the MERZ exhibition ‘Landscape of the Waves’, featuring the work of Alex Rigg and Charles Jencks and developments at the Crawick Multiverse.
Jeffrey Hoffman made five flights as a space shuttle astronaut, including the first mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, when the orbiting telescope’s flawed optical system was corrected. Trained as an astrophysicist, he also flew on 1990 Spacelab shuttle mission that featured the ASTRO-1 ultraviolet astronomical observatory in the shuttle’s payload bay. Over the course of his five missions he logged more than 1,211 hours and 21.5 million miles in space.
Charles Jencks is an American architecture theorist and critic, landscape architect and designer. His books on the history and criticism of modernism and postmodernism are widely read in architectural circles. He studied under the influential architectural historians Sigfried Giedion and Reyner Banham. Jencks lives in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland where he designs landscape sculpture.
An interview with Charles Jencks and Alex Rigg can be found at vimeo.com/172419807. A clip on the work of A’ the Airts to develop the famous Sanquhar knitwear can be found at vimeo.com/147865394.
The MERZ exhibition runs to 3rd September while Crawick Multiverse and A’ the Airts are open year-round.
Remco De Fou, Annabel Konig, Rachel Joynt, Gwen Wilkinson, Michelle Byrne, Anthony Lyttle, Martin Lyttle, Cathy Fitzgerald and Jules Michael.
The Nine Stones Artists was formed in 2004. Its members are professional artists who live and work in the foothills of the Blackstairs Mountains in South County Carlow. The process of making a life in the country is not to be underestimated. Out here in the depths of the countryside, solitude can be had, but of course you are far from shut off. There is busyness all around, in the warp and weave of rural work and living, and connectivity through on-line networks and the internet. And, up the road, your neighbours and fellow artists, who you can turn to, to borrow tools or seek out critical advice and at least share the challenges that confront the lives of contemporary artists.
02 July – 16 October, Visual Carlow
A homecoming in viola, voice, movement, animation and storytelling, Pulse is the story of Mairi Campbell’s quest to heal cultural wounds.
Fifth in the 2015 WriterSeries of interviews from the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Sometimes we need a bit of a jolt to remind us our filmmaking started to present voices seldom heard and faces seldom seen on mainstream media. For decades those missing from TV’s news might just as well have never got together to make their views visible. Tom Duda’s fine film reassures us that Europe is far more important as a cultural and social idea than as represented as economic entity.
For more of Tom’s work go to freshmintstudio.com
A native of Crosshaven, Luke Sisk draws on childhood folklore from Camden Fort Meagher as well as architectural and engineering details, to create a body of work that combines fact and fiction through the medium of glass and ceramics. Sisk’s practice uses repetition of wheel-thrown porcelain vessels as a way of portraying information about the space they are in, an aesthetic he has steadily been developing over a number of years.
In contrast to the minimal style of his ceramics, he uses kiln-formed cast glass as a more sculptural outlet, taking casts from locations around the fort and translating them into solid glass sculptures.
Exhibition on from 9th July to 24th July 2016, Camden Fort Meagher Gallery, Crosshaven, Cork.
Fourth in the 2015 series of WriterStories from the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Cré, an Irish Gaelic word meaning earthen or made of clay. This exhibition presents work by the 10 current graduates of the internationally renowned DCCoI’s Ceramics Skills and Design Course in Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny.
Hosted in the prestigious location of the National Craft Gallery, this exhibition showcases the innovation and diversity in ceramic design and technique of 10 of Irelands newest makers establishing their identity in the contemporary ceramic market. It represents the culmination of two years intensive training in all aspects of ceramics skills and design.
Visitors will have the opportunity to view and purchase a wide variety of hand crafted work ranging from tableware to sculpture to musical instruments.
15 July – 1 August 2016
Third in the 2015 series of WriterStories.
The Eileen Gray exhibition realised one of Gray’s last ambitions – to have her work brought back to Ireland. Regarded as one of the most influential 20th Century designers and architects, the exhibition includes important items such as the adjustable chrome table and the non-conformist chair.
The exhibition also values Gray on a personal level, including family photographs, her lacquering tools, and personal ephemera. It illustrates an account of her professional development from art student in London and Paris to mature, innovative architect.
Eileen Gray, an Irishwoman, was one of the leading members of the modern design movement. Renowned in France during the early decades of the 20th Century as a designer in lacquer furniture and interiors, she then began to experiment with architectural forms in the late 1920s.
Being an avant garde artist Gray constantly reacted to new art movements and her individuality and ideas developed in Paris against its vibrant and artistic backdrop. In the world of design hers was a new approach to shape, line, the use of colour, materials and textures; yet the human sensibility of her work continues to inspire designers today.
This permanent exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin honours the memory of Eileen Gray, a self-taught modernist architect and designer.
Second in the 2015 WriterStories series for TV transmission.
This twenty four minute programme is compiled from interviews with the artists and organisers of British Arts Show 8 staged in Edinburgh at Talbit Rice, Inverleith House and the Gallery of Modern Art throughout Spring 2016. BAS8 is touring throughout 2016 to galleries in Leeds, Norwich and Southampton.
Peter Murray, Éimear O’Connor, Anne Boddaert and Dawn Williams introduce the current exhibitions, Conflicting Visions in a Turbulent Age: 1900–1916, Perceptions 2016: The Art of Citizenship and 1916 Ireland in Contemporary Art.
One of a series of broadcast programme length compilation of interviews from the 2015 Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Compilation of recent arts-news clips from culturefox.tv.
Compilation of recent arts-news clips from culturefox.tv.
Compilation of recent arts-news clips from culturefox.tv.
Summerhall’s 2016 festival programme, a feast of theatre, performance, dance, visual art and music for audiences of all ages, is on sale now via the Edinburgh Fringe box office.
Exhibition of Paintings & Prints by Lorraine Fenlon Artist & Tutor and featuring a special debut showing of the fine work of young students of Red Apple Arts.
Raffle in aid of Carlow Regional Youth Services.
“A ‘message’ may not always be apparent in my work, nor does it need to be. However, I do feel that people can suffer throughout their lives with loss, grief, illness, mental health, hardship, bullying and trauma to name but a few. I use light, colour, texture and strong compositions to bring a vibrancy to my work. I like my art to feel uplifting. Choosing a painting is a lifetime investment. I think it should make an impact, brighten your home and cheer you to look at it.
As I have strong feelings about mental health issues, I feel prevention is always better than cure. Look after our children and they will look after the world. The Children I teach on Fridays are very talented and to be honest, I am the bigger child in the class. We have great fun. This is the first time for them to exhibit their work. I hope you like it.
To tie in with the theme, I am delighted to raffle a set of Framed Limited Edition Prints in aid of Carlow Regional Youth Services who do great things for the health, well-being and confidence of our local youth.
I hope you will come along to support us all and enjoy this exhibition.
Exhibiting until 15th July, Carlow Co. Library
Internationally acclaimed photographer Pieter Hugo engages with documentary and art traditions to create intense and challenging images. Blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, his portraits can be read as a comment on identity, belonging and self-expression in post-colonial Africa. This exhibition brings together three of Hugo’s most compelling series of works: “The Hyena and Other Men” (2005-07), Nollywood, (2008) and “Permanent Error” (2009-10).
This exhibition will be on at the Gallery of Photography until 21 August 2016.
Droichead Arts Centre presents ‘Who Gotta Match’ by Laura Gramzow.
Laura’s studio space is filled with collages and maquettes, that she refers to as she moves onto canvas and assemblages, adding and subtracting till she gets to the point where she thinks the piece has its’ own personality with a few qualities that are related to her, but which ultimately can stand alone. Many of the larger paintings interact with ready-made objects.
30 June to 27 August | 29 June, 7.30pm
