March 2022
Great to be back working at Tyrone Guthrie Centre again. Because there is still Covid about, it’s a bit different. There is separation between the residents staying in the big house and those in the cottages. When Covid ends this will happen again. In the meantime it is pure magic to stand beside the lake shore in early morning totally shrouded in white fog, and watch the far shore very slowly emerge.
Irish Examiner, My Weekend: The sea is an ever-changing constant in my life
End of the Day
1st November 1920
07.08.2020
Bernadette Burns' work features in Sherkin Island’s annual Community Art Exhibition at the Community Hall, this month
Bernadette Burns is an artist who lives and works on Sherkin Island. Prior to the Covid lockdown, she had a solo exhibition at Galway Arts Centre throughout January and February, entitled The Uncertainty of History — Remembering Eileen Quinn. This interdisciplinary exhibition used painting, drawing, video and installation work to explore concepts of memory, loss and rewritten histories. It is planned to travel this exhibition when some sort of normality returns to our lives.
Tell us a little bit about yourself:
Originally from Galway, I went to Dublin to study art at NCAD, and then taught on the Fine Art programme at DIT for many years. I was one of the instigators of BA Visual Art programme on Sherkin.
I first visited Sherkin Island when I was in my twenties. I fell in love with the place and the community, and felt a strong sense of belonging, of home. Afterwards I always spent a lot of time there, whenever I could.
My husband Fergus Murphy and I are fortunate to live here now. We are both painters and love the solitude. The light and the weather are constantly changing.
We begin each day with a walk on the beach before going to work in our studios. A golden lining of the Coronavirus was that our daughter Róisín, who has been living in Sydney for nine years, came home and has lived with us for almost five months.
What is your ideal way to spend a Friday night?
When Covid is not part of our lives we enjoy a drink in the Jolly Roger pub. The pub has always stayed open in the winter, and is a crucial part of community life for a small island.
Lie-ins or up with the lark.. which is it for you?
My first cup of coffee always tastes the best. I usually have it in bed about seven. Then I feel ready to face the day. I always do some scribbling in my notebooks before I get out of the bed, and this sets me up to work in the studio.
Does work creep into your weekend at all?
Working as an artist, there is a lot of blur around weekend/weekdays. I work in my studio most mornings.
If money was no object, where would you head to on a weekend city break? And who would you bring with you?
Fergus and I love Venice, and I would love to visit it for a weekend with our daughter Róisín and her partner Mike. The light and reflections on the canals are so beautiful, the silence and lack of traffic is unexpected and every corner you turn looks like a film set. The art, food and wine are also wonderful.
Closer to home, is there some place you like to head to recharge the batteries?
We are blessed to be living in such a beautiful place, Sherkin has lots of wonderful quiet places to walk and sit and watch the sea.
We start each day with a walk (and sometimes a swim) on Silver Strand. The sea is an ever-changing constant in my life. When life presents difficulties, I always find time beside the sea to be healing.
Do you like to catch up with family/friends at the weekend?
We really enjoy visits from friends and family, and although Sherkin was possibly one of the best places to be during Covid lockdown, it is wonderful to be able to have family and friends visit us again.
Do you get to indulge any hobbies? Even as a spectator?
Walking and taking note of sea birds and the smaller garden birds. The hedgerows here are always full of life and colour.
During the winter we have a ceramics group who meet in the Community Hall and work together. Fergus and I also both enjoy reading and films.
Entertain or be entertained? If it’s the latter do you have a signature dish?
When we are off the island we love to go to the cinema and try new food. I enjoy cooking Greek food for family and friends, in particular moussaka and spinakopitta.
We have so many places to eat out in Cork — where are your go to spots for coffee / lunch / special meal?
We love to eat at North Shore on Sherkin, run by our friends Kathy, Mike and Daniel O’Connor. We don’t visit the city often, but I love to meet friends for lunch at the Crawford Gallery or at Quay Co-op.
Sunday night comes around too fast.. how do you normally spend it?
We lead a very quiet life. A nice Sunday evening for me is a good film and a glass of wine.
What time does your alarm clock go off on Monday morning?
I never set an alarm, but usually get up about eight.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
Ber’s work is currently part of Sherkin Island’s annual Community Art Exhibition at the Community Hall, which runs until August 23. It is open on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays throughout that period, from noon until 5.30pm, and will operate to strict Covid-19 guidelines including the use hand sanitisers, face coverings for all visitors and a one-way system in line with social distancing requirements.
Curated by Sherkin Island artist and graduate of the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork, Jordyn Lynch, the exhibition includes all mediums, including drawings, paintings, writing, sculpture, photography, textiles and ceramics. For ferry times see: http://www.sherkinisland.eu/ferry
Catalogue essay by Siún Hanrahan for The Uncertainty of History: remembering Eileen Quinn
A small painting in which an elegant, beautifully wrought sofa sits in front of a window amid a swirl of soft cloud and text – a moment of piercing clarity within a dreamscape – offers a starting point from which to negotiate the complex currents of ‘The Uncertainty of History’. This painting, Looking Backwards, marks a departure within Burns’ work, one that brings a sustained and evocative exploration of memory and place into contact with the brute specificity of history. It also encapsulates that departure.
Where recurrent motifs in Burns’ work tend to be archetypal, the distinctive detail of the sofa in Looking Backwards suggests that this is not a sofa, this is the sofa; it is particular. Where traces of text are wont to float tantalisingly out of reach – just beneath the surface, fragmentary, just beyond deciphering – in Looking Back the painted text is a single, wholly legible diary entry.
These two elements within the painting belie one another, and in so doing, articulate the entanglement of memory and history; the beauty and poise of the sofa is undone by and, in turn, undoes, the bare facts of an horrific killing. It is on this sofa that Eileen Quinn bled to death between 3pm and 10pm on November 1st, 1920, having been shot by the Black and Tansi; and it is with these few words that her sister marked the calamity that befell Eileen, three infant children, her unborn child, husband and family.
The pain and effect of that loss as it has echoed through the family is at the heart of this work. The insistent call of the work Remember me, comes from within the family. Eileen’s death is recorded in history books and immortalised in the poetry of Yeats, and yet this fear of forgetting or being forgotten reverberates. Maybe ‘remember me’ is the cry of the infant or small child, directed to the one enveloped in pain and death. Or maybe it is the helpless hope and wish of the family, unable to stem the loss and struggling to find a way to remember her story, their story.
History and memory are entangled in this uncertainty. In respect of the historical record, the incident was barely investigated, and although it was extensively covered in the press and raised in parliament, the report of the (Military) Court of Inquiry into the killing of Eileen Quinn is missing. For Burns, the kernel of the uncertainty lies with the diary entry. The diary belonged to a close friend and ally, her grandmother, and yet this was not a part of her grandmother that Burns knew; she only discovered the diary after her grandmother died.
And so, the facts have not been laid bare, in the historical record or within the family. For the artist’s grandmother, the intractable experience of pain was failed by words, it could not be spoken of, and could not find a place in the story of a life. And yet pain is insistent, it demands to be accounted for and to be taken into account. The question is, how? Is sense made by gaining a little distance or is its expression something closer than words?
The exhibition is equivocal. The vitrines and artefacts evoke a cool museological analysis, the paintings resist this. Bell jars serve to preserve and display, and yet their moment is trapped and stifled. Books are painstakingly assembled – curated page by page, hand stitched; beautiful and deeply ambivalent. Is their gift an excavation of memory or, as Socrates feared, an act of forgetting? In the paintings, in End of Day, is the boat anchored or adrift, is the uncertain light a threat or a promise?
If not quite a promise, the work lays claim to hope; a hope that, like Eileen’s sofa, it is possible to rescue and restore. As a public document, the exhibition seeks to rescue and restore the story of Eileen Quinn, to create a space between profane accounts and illustrious figures for another kind of telling. As personal document, the hope is that it is possible to remember well; that it is possible to remember, even the most abject of memories, and think anew.
Hope lies in a boat, a ladder, a lifeline. A way to get in, a way to get out. A promise of safe passage. Hope lies in lines and lines of incised text; a record, a trace, an act of faith. And there is hope in the longevity of the Hawthorn, in the love and protection it symbolises, and in the welcoming glow of home in Family Tree III.
And yet. The bold solidity of the tree is illusory, the birds are taking flight, and the site is cruelly marked by Eileen’s death. Alongside longing there is an unsettling stillness. The exhibition marks the death of Eileen Quinn, erased from the lives of her children, and their children. And the exhibition is marked by an erasure: rage. The rage of the soldier against ‘the enemy’, and perhaps against those with poise, possessions, a home. The rage of the bereft child, husband, sister; a crushing absence echoing unspoken through the family, in the community.
Hope is precarious, both tentative and bold. And the work of remembering is vital, in and for all of its uncertainties. Hope can withstand rage, and rage deserves its place. The challenge remains: how to remember well.
i While the diary entry attributes the killing to the Black n’ Tans, the trucks from which the shot was fired were carrying an Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (ex-military officers recently returned from the battlefields of Flanders).
Irish Examiner: "Shooting death of pregnant woman inspires exhibit"
SAT, 11 JAN, 2020
LORNA SIGGINS
photo credit; Irish Examiner
When a mother of three received fatal injuries at her home almost a century ago in south Galway, Arthur Griffiths was telegrammed about it and WB Yeats recorded its impact in two of his poems.
Eileen Quinn was 24 years old, seven months pregnant, and waiting for her husband to return from Gort fair when she was shot and bled to death on November 1, 1920.
Now the event has been interpreted in a, exhibition by Ms Quinn’s grand-niece, artist Bernadette Burns, which opened last night in Galway Arts Centre.
Ms Quinn’s sister wrote in her diary that the shots had been fired by the Black and Tans, but the military court of inquiry ruled it as “death by misadventure”.
However, it was reported that the trucks from which the shot was fired were carrying an Auxiliary division of the Royal Irish Constabulary — being former military officers recently returned from the First World War battlefields of Flanders.
“There is a fine line between both, but it is her death and the impact of it on her family that inspired me,” Ms Burns said.
There is no one factual truth or telling of an event or story, there are many strands, versions, and viewpoints of any event that has happened.
It took some time for a doctor and priest to arrive, and she died after 10pm that night.
Ms Burns’s grandmother’s diary is at the centre of the exhibition, and the Galway Observer report of November 6, 1920, formed part of her extensive research.
“It is too awful, too inhuman to contemplate,” local curate Fr Considine told the newspaper.
“I have read of Turkish atrocities; I have read of the death of Joan of Arc; I have read of the sufferings of Nurse Cavell, and as I read those things I often felt my blood boil and I often prayed that the good God might change the minds and hearts of those cruel monsters,” said the priest.Fr Considine
Ms Burns is a painter who works with drawing, photography, sculpture, video, and book making, and was fine art lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology for many years. She has exhibited her work in Ireland, Spain, and Greece.
Her exhibition entitled The Uncertainty of History: Remembering Eileen Quinn continues at the Galway Arts Centre until February 21.
Visual Arts Ireland: The Uncertainty of History: Remembering Eileen Quinn | Bernadette Burns at Galway Arts Centre
Date/Time
10/01/2020 - 21/01/2020
Location
Galway Arts Centre
Website
https://www.galwayartscentre.ie/en
Email
maeve@galwayartscentre.ie
Bernadette Burns’ multimedia art practice of focuses on memory and change, on how there are many strands and versions of a story rather than a single factual truth. The paintings, sculpture, audio and artist’s books in this exhibition grew from a diary entry by her grandmother Tessie Burns referring to the shooting of Eileen, her younger sister.
Ist November 1920 (Monday)
My sister, Eileen Quinn was shot at Corker by the Black and Tans at 3pm, she died at 10pm. She was 25 years old.
At 3 o’clock in the afternoon of 1st. November 1920, Eileen was standing at her front garden gate holding her infant daughter Tessie, and was with her two young children Alfie and Eva. She was seven months pregnant. Two trucks drove along with ‘Auxiliaries’ in them. Someone from the first truck shot Eileen and they continued driving. She was brought into her home, and survived to tell the story to a few visitors. It took a long time for the doctor and priest to get there, and she slowly bled to death, dying after 10 that night.
This exhibition explores family memory as a valid addition to the canon of history.
Bernadette is a painter who works with drawing, photography, sculpture, video and book making. Bernadette was a lecturer in Fine Art at the Dublin Institute of Technology for many years. She was one of the instigators of BA Visual Art, an innovative honours degree programme delivered by DIT on Sherkin Island. She has given up teaching in order to focus on her own art practice. She has exhibited her work in Ireland, Spain and Greece.
Exhibition opening 6pm Friday 10 January by Dr. Siún Hanrahan
Orla Higgins will give a talk on Saturday 11th January entitled Reprisals – the short Life and tragic Death of Eileen Quinn.
Gerard Quinn will give a talk on Saturday 18th January ‘Legalised Illegality – Reflections on the Killing of Eileen Quinn in the Irish War of Independence and the Value of Forgiveness’
'The Uncertainty of History - remembering Eileen Quinn'; exhibition opening
“The Uncertainty of History-remembering Eileen Quinn” at 6pm, Galway Arts Centre, Dominic St. on Friday 10th January.
Orla Higgins will give a talk entitled ‘Reprisals-the short Life and tragic Death of Eileen Quinn' the following day 11th January at 2pm.
Gerard Quinn will give a talk entitled ‘Legalised illegality- Reflections on the killing of Eileen Quinn and the value of Forgiveness” on Saturday 18th January at 2 pm.
Both talks will take place at Galway Arts Centre.
Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you know who would be interested,
Look forward to seeing you,
Ber
Róisín Foley Review Essay: Falling into the Sky
The O’Driscoll Building, Skibbereen Summer 2019
Falling into the Sky is an artistic collaboration between Bernadette Burns, Wendy Dison, Nicola Kelly, Tess Leak and Gana Roberts. They have been meeting as a group and working on projects together since May 2018. Guided by intuition and inspired by a phrase from John Banville’s novel Ghosts, Falling into the Sky reminds us of the necessity in making art as a means to both process and document the stories within and around us. They meet regularly and take turns to initiate projects and most recently have started to make exhibitions. The collective’s most recent exhibition was situated in the O’Driscoll building, Skibbereen and ran in conjunction with the annual Skibbereen Arts Festival. It was an enclave from which to consider the value and merit of working as a collaborative unit, and how such practice can produce an effective and perhaps even better alternative to operating from within the white cube.
The “pop up” exhibition is now a frequent fixture in the Irish art scene and with the right support it can achieve successful results. Such an approach to exhibiting allows for artists to explore curatorial models outside the bounds and ties of traditional gallery spaces (private or public). Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist briefly outlines the history of exhibition making and curation in his book Ways of Curatingi. He speaks of exhibition making coming out of the necessity for artisanal craftspeople to show their best works during the seasonal festive periods of the Middle Ages. Master craftsmen selected the best works of their apprentices and themselves for display to passing crowds. There is something about these medieval makers who formed these guilds that resonates with artist’s collectives and collaborations such as Falling into the Sky. Perhaps it is the shared belief in doing something together, deciding to set aside personal bias. These artists are favouring creative progression through order implemented by a group, with a view to sustaining a more interesting creative environment in broader society.
In the case of Falling into the Sky, all aspects of exhibition formulation were generated and conducted by the artists themselves. In such practices we are much closer to the original intent of the artists and their work. The first time I visited the exhibition I was greeted by Bernadette Burns and she was able to give me in depth information about each artist. Having the artists look after the exhibition awards visitors the opportunity to learn more about the work, it also provides the artists with first hand feedback.
“Collaboration allows for in-depth communication between artists to try out ideas, test theories and enable creativity to flourish.”ii
The collaborative nature of the project allows for a deeper and more open critical conversation between the artists which would not be possible without organisation. The necessity to develop and exhibit is often quite limiting for artists who live and work in rural environs. Shared permanent artist led exhibition and work space is basically non-existent in West Cork. The desire to cooperatively rent a space is also limited by unaffordable rents. Falling into the Sky have overcome this hurdle by implementing this peer to peer exchange. This dedication and sense of camaraderie is truly commendable and shows how serious they are about their work.
“We are dealing with an unfolding process rather than, or in addition to, a discrete image, object or event defined by set limits of space (the walls of a gallery) or time (the duration of a performance or commission), these questions become decisive in the analysis of the work.”iii
In relation to Falling into the Sky at the O’Driscoll building the above statement fits quite effectively. Work filled the space. The exhibition showed large and ambitious work, collective project work, fun work, serious work, work made with an array of materials, work made from an array of ideas. The deliberate absence of standardised gallery tactics which are used to lead viewers to certain works or to create lineation between artists’ works encouraged inquisitive movement throughout the space. Hence, encounters with particular works were by chance. The display had no sense of hierarchy. Space was not divided, space was used collectively, artists were not assigned an individual space and the works were not categorised by any obvious systems. One was encouraged to move from work to work and to pause when called to do so by a particular piece amidst the gentle expanse of material. An ambience sat in the space, a quiet humming. A sense of suspension, perhaps similar to being caught in a light fog before it passes hung in the space. It stirred a feeling of transience, of inevitable change. The non-lineal experience of the space conjured the true sense of the nature of collaboration.
This deliberate cause to pause mid-air whilst falling into the sky was purposeful. It allowed the artists to spend the necessary time in an adequate space with their work in order to assess the reception of the work in a public place. It also allowed for time to further devise and implement strategies for displaying work that challenge typical exhibition structures. This was not solely an exhibition focused on the collaboration’s projects nor was it a thematic group exhibition of works most often compacted together under titles and metaphors. It was an exhibition with the intention of showing and sharing and trying something new.
In this exhibition co-working coupled with the liberating process of working outside the administered gallery space has evidently created circumstances from which to enable intuitive systems of creativity in the group. Having identified the favourable technical and functional working elements of the group (which are essential to its operation), deeper and more valuable resonances are more apparent.
It did indeed feel like an invitation for the viewer to practice the process of intuitive encounter as is a method practiced by Falling into the Sky. This is applied to projects both instigated by the group and now obviously within their own practices. Intuitive practice can be aligned with process led practice which identifies the making of work as something which occurs by the working through as opposed to working on a project. There is no prescribed product or piece that the artist is working towards. The artist is ordinarily working through an idea with their chosen material and welcomes surprise. Working intuitively follows a similar pattern to making a story and when investigating the artists further it is obvious that they each have an interest in story or telling stories.
“A master storyteller blends the narrative ingredients of traditional legend with description of his local environment, both physical and social, to express thoughts about human relations and the life of the individual”iv
In essence, in order to make a good story you must have knowledge or interest in story or “traditional legend” which you can utilise as a template from which to tell another story. The type of story you wish to tell is limitless. However, a really good story always makes a thought-provoking observation on life and finds a way to connect with the listener (or in the following cases with the viewer). The artists of Falling into the Sky use story in their work. The artists merge intuitive practice with the art of making to create story. Templates or methods of storytelling are visible in the visual language which each artist employs; that is the materials used and the way in which in which the work is made. Personal or cognitive experience is manifested through this making. In this exhibition many works share a similar cause, they share a similar story, though not by intention. Greif does not abound in the exhibition but its presence and obvious influence on the artists cannot escape further enquiry. These works document the story of grief.
Kerri Ní Dorchartaigh writes “Grief is a country that has no definite borderlines and that recognises no single trajectory. It is a space that did not exist before your loss, and that will never disappear from your map, no matter how hard you rub at the charcoal lines. You are changed utterly, and your personal geography becomes yours and yours only, for that brief moment in time.”v
Grief is a profound notion and one which is most often not openly expressed in artists’ work. Yet, in this exhibition many of the works are in some way linked to the phenomena of grief. Allowing oneself to work intuitively may be the cause of why such a range of works are so close to loss. The working through and story creation as practiced by Falling into the Sky allows the artists the permissions which they might need to process and truly express grief. The process of expressing grief collectively (through peer to peer exchange) also provides a source of open support, which then in turn becomes accessible to the public through these groups exhibitions.
In Wendy Dison’s work she combines her personal experience of grief with a broader societal problem. Boat is her way to map this. Her work is about human experience and most recently it has been about her own experience of grief. Figures (human or non-human) are a common fixture in Wendy’s work. These forms are part of her visual language and are used to engage with the viewer in order to translate human experience. Her solo exhibition The Sound of Ravens opened in November 2019 at The West Cork Arts Centre. The exhibition dealt directly with the notion of grief as manifested through the form of the raven. Knowing this I am given cause to believe that her work Boat is an expanded vision of grief. Coupled with information that her work for Falling into the Sky is concerned with migration and exclusion, we are invited to believe the work is more about how she applies her understanding of grief to the current crisis of migration. The single cotton sheet is the boat, its passengers these indistinct persons. The fate of these passengers rests on our understanding of the sheet. The sheet implies sleep, dreaming, thought and processing: it also implies singularity. Can the sheet be a representation of the artist as she contemplates this collective of passengers? Perhaps this grouping symbolises the crisis of migration in its entirety, of this innate connection which she feels to loss itself.
For Gana Roberts grief is expressed as collective grief from her experience whilst in Lesvos. She literally lays one story out. Lost Lives is a work directly dealing with the migrant crisis in Greece. Having spent time volunteering in Lesvos she was urged to make a work speaking about the tragic story of how 363 individuals were drowned at sea during January 2016 while she was working on the island. Gana and her friends sewed the outline of 363 socks onto a large sheet of heavy cotton. The delicacy of these traces on the sheet, laid flat on the floor, is another way of making a map, of making a story. Gana is mapping empathy and collective grievance. The work can be viewed as a memorial or anti-monument, a reflection on the horrors that are sadly instilled within our society and for which we are all, albeit obliquely, responsible. Gana’s current work blends ideas around the individual and the instability we are collectively faced with in current society.
Material has the potential to convey emotion and experience, for Nicola Kelly this is paramount. Clay is the material which she employs most often as a means to “reflect the precarious nature of human existence”vi. Her piece, 512 is a collection of fragile porcelain vessels arranged on the floor of the space, the flaws glimmer; they are highlighted by a golden glaze. Nicola has spoken about this piece and refers to the work as a way of mapping personal grief. This emotive work holds the viewer in a tense state. The work is within precarious breaking distance, so quickly could one crush one element and in doing so destroy the entire display. I am reminded of moments when my own grief surfaces, unaware that it is just beneath my viewing range-like Nicola’s work. Sometimes a single instance can shatter my stability, yet how beautiful those moments are. And they are the purest most delicate forms of human emotion, like these vessels, where all the deepest flaws and experiences are precious, golden.
Floodgate by Bernadette Burns deals directly with the shooting of Eileen Quinn in Galway in 1920. Eileen Quinn was Bernadette’s aunt who was visibly pregnant when The Black and Tans opened fire on her while she was standing by her front wall in the presence of her three young children. The reasons for the shooting are unknown, such was the way in many of these tragic incidents that occurred during this time in our history. The incident is currently a major element in Bernadette’s work which looks at how the past and the stories that we have from it can become blurred or altered. At present she uses family photographs and a range of archival material in her creative process. Such material may be used in the physical creation of work, or it may provide the contextual depth which her oil paintings are concerned with. Floodgate is Bernadette’s way of transforming this painful story, which is deeply instilled within the collective family and community psyche. Water is used as a cleansing or healing trope in her work; in this painting the artist floods the canvas thus symbolically transforming the memory of the incident. The title Floodgate can be seen as a way of letting this inherent grief become something else, of moving past the point of endless questioning and carrying this sense of deep loss. The children are symbolised as three ladders, this is Bernadette’s way of allowing them to be unconstrained from this situation which must have been monumental in shaping their emotional growth in their formative years. Eileen’s memory is preserved in the wall at the bottom of the canvas. The memory of her is within something that is made of many parts, so the story may very well become fragmented. But these parts are made of stone and stone is a material which endures. This story will be further explored in Galway Arts Centre where Bernadette will have a solo exhibition in January 2020.
Tess Leak’s work at the exhibition was removed from the subject of grief. Tess’ work at this exhibition is deeply involved with intuitive and free practice which is why she forms part of the group. This fluidity and apparent joy in making must come from her closeness to music and sonic arts. The experimental and improvisational nature of her musical projects certainly influences her visual arts practice. It is also apparent that she enjoys making, her work is curious and humorous. In Tess’ work Om, story reveals itself in that the character becomes animate through the curious mind of the viewer who asks “who is Om?” And “where did he get that hat?” Bernadette told me Tess found Om’s hat. It fits him perfectly. Om is a fictional character so he does not have a biography and he can be what you like. He is a puppet which Tess made as part of a group project. He wears a long shawl or cape-like ensemble and a visor cap. He is bright and shiney. I think Om is a sonic being, he transcends dimensions with sound. I think Om is an associate of Sun Ra or of Ziggy Star Dust. He is a self-professed master of intuition.
Falling into the Sky allows for the artists to traverse different aspects of their work collectively. The network of support is primary to the maintenance of the artist’s work. Collective exhibition making helps the artists to draw the necessary lines they need around the work. Most importantly it enhances and invigorates the local and national art scene. The work involved in making this happen is unquantifiable however the positive benefits to the artist’s and broader society are too. When thinking about projects such as Falling into the Sky we must remember the basic potential and functions art can have on all aspects of society. It is quite simple, yet affective. Artists such as those active in Falling into the Sky share their experience of the world, in a way they translate this experience. They provide new ways from which to portray the experience of being human, perhaps enabling viewers to understand their experience of the most phenomenal emotions or events that occur in our everyday lives.
References:
i Obrist, Hans Ulrich with Raza, Asad: Ways of Curating, 2015, Penguin Books, United Kingdom
ii Powell, Jan: Essay-Artistic Collaboration, The Visual Artists’ News Sheet, July-August 2019, Visual Artists Ireland, Ireland.
iii Kester, Grant: Essay-Collaborative Arts and the limits of criticism, CREATE News, May 2013, Ireland.
iv Bourke, Angela: Essay-Economic Necessity and Escapist Fantasy in Éamon A Búres Sea Stories. Lysaght, Patricia, Ó Latháin, Séamas and ÓLhógháin, Dáithí: Islanders and Water Dwellers, DBA Publications LTD, Dublin, 1999, Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin.
v Ní Dochartaigh, Kerri: Essay-Closer; Not too Close, 2019, Crossing the Dissour, Greywood Arts, Killeagh, Co. Cork. http://crossingthedissour.ie/wp/portfolio/closer-not-too-close-kerri-ni-dochartaigh/
vi Kelly, Nicola: Artists Statement, Falling into the Sky exhibition information sheet. August 2019. Skibbereen, Co.Cork.
Falling Into The Sky; exhibition opening
Come to the opening of our exhibition, Falling into the Sky, on Saturday at 3pm in Damer House Gallery, Roscrea,
Falling into the sky is a visual collaborative adventure devised by a group of five West Cork artists who are working across familiar and unfamiliar platforms including drawing, painting, ceramics, book making and installation. The artwork represents a journey into unchartered territories. It is informed using intuitive task related methodologies to develop a body of work that cannot have been anticipated at the outset or throughout the duration of this project.
The title references a phrase from John Banville’s novel Ghosts, which we use as a metaphor for groundlessness and as a kind of leap of the imagination.
Bernadette Burns - Wendy Dison - Nicola Kelly - Tess Leak - Gana Roberts
an island, a boat, a ladder, some cloud...
Anyone close to Schull next Friday at 6 please come along to my opening of an island, a boat, a ladder, some cloud...at Blue House Gallery, also exhibitions by Johanna Connor and Fiona Walsh