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Taking part in the Food Power School at A Fair Land

Leah Whelan, Sophianne Lubasa and Béibhinn O’Hair, at the Food Power School as part of A Fair Land. IMMA

A Food Power School took place at IMMA over three weeks as part of A Fair Land to re-discover the power in domestic life. In this article Sophianne Lubasa tells us about her experience at the school where she learned about the harvesting, preparing and cooking of courgettes from the crop in the courtyard to the lunch diners at the OR/AND table. All activities in the Food School were closely guided and mentored by the Fair Land Team making the food. Pictured above Sophianne tells about the school in her own words.

I was lucky enough to take part in ‘A Fair Land’ at IMMA recently. I thoroughly enjoyed the four days and was delighted to write this blog detailing my experience when I was asked to!

The first day:

On the first day the four of us met Mark Maguire from IMMA’s Engagement and Learning Team in the reception at IMMA. He spoke to us about IMMA and explained we were going to participate in the food school for the four days. He also explained about the other workshops taking place. Mark then brought us to meet Adam Sutherland, Grizedale Art’s director, who was the coordinator for the day. Adam showed us around and gave us a real feel for what A Fair Land was all about.

IMMA’S courtyard was transformed into a village where visitors were able to partake in making aprons and bowls. They were also able to enjoy the food being made using the courgettes grown at IMMA. We picked the courgettes and courgette flowers which were growing in the middle of the courtyard. We observed the cooking on the first day and helped Adam with the setting up of the lunch. The lunch consisted of courgette based dishes and all of the plates and bowls were made at IMMA. We then got to sit down for lunch ourselves. The first dish was a delicious oriental soup with courgette noodles. After that we had a lovely courgette salad with buckwheat, dill and feta cheese. Lastly we had courgette cake which was so moist and didn’t taste anything like courgettes!

After the lunch we helped Adam with a food demonstration using courgette flowers. It was very interesting because I had never eaten a flower before never mind a deep fried flower with ricotta in the middle. This is a dish I look forward to making at home myself

A Fair Land Village. Photo: Motoko Fujita
A Fair Land Village. Photo: Motoko Fujita

Day two:

We all met in the reception again the next morning. Mark asked us how we had found the experience so far. Two of us went to help Adam with his cooking demonstration and the other two stayed to learn how to prepare the lunch and mobile food that was to be sold at IMMA.

I stayed in the kitchen and chopped courgettes for the salad. Then I assisted with preparing some flat bread crackers. Afterwards I helped to make the lemon biscuits to be served in the mobile food and at the lunch too. The team then delivered the food to the lunch guests. After the food was delivered we had our lunch and got a chance to taste of all the dishes. We discussed the food and were encouraged to give our feedback on any way we thought the dishes could be improved. We then cleaned up and prepared some of the food for the next day.

The table laid for the courgette lunch. Photo: Emily O'Callaghan
The table laid for the courgette lunch. Photo: Emily O’Callaghan

Day three:

After meeting in reception, we firstly went to one of the studios and got to print aprons for ourselves and also for the shop. Next we went to the kitchen to learn more about the food for the lunch. Afterwards we helped with the mobile food too. We then served the food to the guests and once again we had our lunch. Finally, we cleaned up and prepared some food for the following day when we would get a chance to demonstrate what we had learned over the previous three days.

Day four:

I arrived early on the last day so I went to the kitchen and helped to prepare vegetarian sushi balls for the mobile food. I had never made sushi before so it was a great experience. We all went to one of the studios at IMMA and printed tags. I then went to the kitchen to chop the courgettes. I then started preparing the salads and putting them into beautiful handmade bowls. After that we then served the food to the lunch guests which was met with lots of “oohh”s and some guests took pictures which was really nice to see. For the last time we sat down to lunch ourselves. We also collected any recipes which were of interest to us. Finally we all then went to watch a ravioli cooking demonstration in the courtyard.

Overall it was a great experience and I would definitely do it all over again. I am also very grateful to IMMA for giving me this chance to take part in the food school and making me feel so welcome. To be very honest I didn’t really like courgettes beforehand but since I have seen the many different ways they can be used I love them!!!!
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Alongside Sophianne, Leah Whelan and Béibhinn O’Hair, also took part in week two of the Food Power School. IMMA would like to thank them for their dedication and enthusiasm to the project. We would also like to thank the A Fair Land artists who ran the school.

If you would like to try some of the courgette recipes mentioned in this blog, the are available in the Growing magazine produced by A Fair Land.

A Fair Land took place in IMMA’s courtyard for three weeks from 12 to 28 August 2016. Echoing the role artists and the European Arts and Crafts movement played in creating and articulating a new vision for Ireland pre-1916, IMMA and Grizedale Arts (UK) collaborated to create a project that examines the function of art. Click here for full details of A Fair Land and the many different elements of the project.

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The Gordon Lambert Archive Project (Continued)

This is the second of two blogs by Ciara Ball from IMMA’s Visitor Engagement Team introducing Gordon Lambert and his life as a collector and patron as documented through his archive.  A selection of material from the Gordon lambert Archive was on display during National Heritage Week.

Gordon Lambert's suitcase, Photo by Chris Jones
Gordon Lambert’s suitcase, Photo by Chris Jones

Throughout the early 1980’s Gordon Lambert travelled to meetings and exhibitions as a member of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art and continued to support Irish artists and build his own collection. Influenced by his experiences with the International Council and the desire to make his art works more available to a public audience his attention became increasingly focused on the need for a national museum of modern art in Ireland. By the time of his retirement from Jacob’s  in 1986 he had become a prominent figure in a growing movement to create a national museum. By the next year the project had gained the approval of then Taoiseach Charles Haughey and with the promise of Gordon’s artworks as the basis for a nation collection debate began about the best location for a new museum.  A city centre site on the Quays known as ‘Stack A’ and the recently restored Royal Hospital Kilmainham divided public opinion until Haughey ended the discussion by announcing IMMA’s establishment in the Royal Hospital in October 1987.

Gordon Lambert exhibition at IMMA, 1992
Gordon Lambert exhibition at IMMA, 1992

IMMA opened on May 25th 1991 with an inaugural exhibition entitled Inheritance and Transformation. A large selection of works from the Gordon Lambert Collection were first shown in their new home the following year. Over the intervening twenty five years the IMMA Collection has formed the basis of numerous exhibitions, both onsite and in venues throughout the country as part of the museum’s National Programme.

As well as serving on the advisory committee and the first two boards of IMMA during the 1990s, Gordon was a board member of the Art Committee of the Ulster Museum and the Ireland – America Arts Exchange Foundation. He was made an Honorary Doctor in Laws by Trinity College Dublin in 1999 and ended the decade by receiving a Business2Arts award for lifetime commitment to the arts in Ireland.  Despite ill health in his later years, evidence from the archive attests to his continual engagement, through print and correspondence when not possible in person, with all aspects of Ireland’s cultural life, and with the enjoyment and commitment which had always driven him to add so much to it.

Gordon Lambert at home with his Collection
Gordon Lambert at home with his Collection

Material from the Gordon Lambert Archive was on display during National Heritage week. The cataloguing of the archive is ongoing. For more information please contact Ciara Ball [email protected]  or Nuria Carballeira [email protected], Collections Department, IMMA.

Visitors who are interested in Gordon Lambert can also find the works from his collection donated to IMMA here.

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The Gordon Lambert Archive Project

Gordon Lambert’s suitcase containing archive material, Photo: Chris Jones

In the first of two blogs Ciara Ball introduces Gordon Lambert and his life as a collector and art lover before a selection of material from his archive goes on display for National Heritage Week. Ciara Ball is a Member of IMMA’s Visitor Engagement Team. Ciara is working with Nuria Carballeira, Assistant Curator of IMMA’s Collections Department on the Gordon Lambert Archive, IMMA’s first significant archive project funded with help from The Heritage Council.

Gordon Lambert at home with his Collection
Gordon Lambert at home with his Collection

Gordon Lambert was one of the first and most generous supporters of IMMA since the campaign for its creation began in the late 1980s. His private collection of over 300 artworks was gifted in stages to the IMMA Collection following its opening in 1991 and includes many well-loved pieces now familiar to our regular visitors. Since 2005 IMMA has also held Gordon’s expansive art library and archive containing letters, cards, photographs, printed material and ephemera collected over six decades. With the help of a grant from the Heritage Council we have now begun the absorbing task of cataloguing this fascinating resource.

Gordon Lambert studied accounting at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1944 he entered the biscuit manufacturing firm W&R Jacob and began a lifelong career in which he would serve the company as Chief Accountant, Marketing Director, Managing Director and finally Chairman from 1977. It was also in the 1940’s that Gordon met Cecil King who in turn introduced him to a large circle of artists and gallerists, many of whom were to become friends and contributors to his budding collection. Meetings in the Robt. Roberts Cáfe on Grafton Street led to soirées at King’s Pembroke Road home and acquaintance with an artistic circle including Oliver Dowling, Patrick Hennessy, Henry Robertson Craig and gallerist David Hendriks.

Archive material from Gordon Lambert Archive, Photo: Chris Jones
Archive material from Gordon Lambert Archive, Photo: Chris Jones

Gordon bought his first painting Pont du Carrousel (1954) by Barbara Warren in 1954. This was followed by Aperitif (c.1956) by Henry Robertson Craig and Patrick Hennessy’s Boy and Seagull (c.1954), recently included in the very popular exhibition Patrick Hennessy: De Profundis. During the 1960s he continued to support Irish artists while also adding significant international names to his collection. The many friends who congregated in his Rathfarnham home Continue reading The Gordon Lambert Archive Project

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‘Ogle’ by Doireann Ní Ghríofa after Carol Rama’s ‘L’Isola degli occhi’

Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a bilingual writer working both in Irish and English. She frequently participates in cross-disciplinary collaborations, fusing poetry with film, dance, music, and visual art. We are delighted to be able to publish, for the first time, a new work by Doireann written in response to the current retrospective of Carol Rama here at IMMA (closing 1 Aug 2016). Doireann introduces the work below, and the poem follows.

 

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Pictured here on the far right is Carol Rama, L’isola degli occhi (The Island of Eyes), 1967, Plastic eyes, synthetic resin and enamel on canvas, 120 x 160 cm, Private Collection, Installation view at IMMA, photo Denis Mortell.

An Island of Eyes

A first encounter with the work of Carol Rama is a shock, a visceral jolt, an astonishment. As I walked through IMMA’s retrospective of Carol Rama’s life work, I was reminded of a quote by Philip Larkin– “Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can f*** off.” Plucky and boisterous as she was (and no stranger to poetry herself), I feel that Carol Rama would have enjoyed this quote as applied to her art, in fact I can almost imagine the spark in her eye, her hoarse chuckle.

Yet despite the irreverence of that quote, Carol Rama’s work is our business, for it challenges us, it provokes us, it questions us. If art can be considered a reflection then Rama’s work is particularly human, for here we are, in each piece, flawed and messy, muddled and bizarre. Here is the life-work of a woman with guts. Rama is an artist who was driven by her loyalty to the depiction of desire, and to the bodily urge to make and to create. Each work is a challenge, a dare. It isn’t pretty. Rather, Rama is driven to attend to her own instincts, bloody and filthy, foul and true. There is little sense here of attempting to pander to an audience, or seeking approval. Nothing about Rama is easy.  It’s difficult to gaze into the glorious mess of the human psyche. Continue reading ‘Ogle’ by Doireann Ní Ghríofa after Carol Rama’s ‘L’Isola degli occhi’

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Touching, intriguing, descriptive, upsetting

In our Gallery Voices series Evy Richard, from our Visitor Engagement Team, takes us on an insightful journey through the exhibition The Passion According to Carol Rama exploring the extraordinary life and work of Italian artist Carol Rama.
The exhibition is now in its final week ending this Bank Holiday Monday 1 August.
Admission Free.

 

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Carol Rama in her atelier home, Turin, ©Photo: Pino Dell’Aquila, 1989. © Archivio Carol Rama, Torino

A tour of this exhibition is like having a chat. The curators at IMMA have tried to replicate the artist’s apartment in Turin, Italy, where she lived like a recluse for most of her life, until her death on the 25th of September last year. Meandering from room to room, through corridors and passing alcoves is also like being on a journey, discovering the nooks and crannies of Rama’s home.
It is quite dark, lit low and black walls face you at mid corridor.
And the title, The Passion. Double meaning here? The deep impulse to create, paint, draw, no matter what, where nor with what. The main emotion running through 80 odd years of this artist’s life. Maybe also the spiritual Passion, a transcending pain, exposure, the spiritual battle to overcome a lowly “human condition”.
Born in 1918 into an affluent industrialist family, she started drawing at 14 and “ I never stopped, never” (Carol Rama). Her life takes a u-turn when her mother (also maybe her grand-mother?) is interned in a psychiatric hospital. Family conflict, business ruin, a father ousted as homosexual, his suicide? The conjectures are still rife as Carol herself kept a firm and unpredictable rein on her own history. Her death last September may now open more windows into her life. Continue reading Touching, intriguing, descriptive, upsetting

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Will the Mistresses Tools Dismantle the Master’s House?

Across our programme this year there is a focus on exploring human sexuality, gender and identity growing from core themes in several of our exhibitions, including most recently  Patrick Hennessy De Profundis and The Passion According to Carol Rama. As part of this focus IMMA presented a day-long seminar entitled Sexuality, Identity and the State (click to listen back on soundcloud) and a talk by internationally acclaimed feminist theorist and art historian Professor Griselda Pollock.

In this blog Dr Tina Kinsella responds to Griselda Pollock’s talk Re-thinking the Twentieth Century with Carol Rama and Modernist Artist-Women : Creative Practice as Dissidence in the Feminist Century. You can listen back to the original talk on our soundcloud channel.


Will the Mistresses Tools Dismantle the Master’s House?
Griselda Pollock on Creative Practices as Dissidence in the Feminist Century

By Dr Tina Kinsella 

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The Passion According to Carol Rama, Installation view IMMA, 2016. Photo Denis Mortell.

Creative Practice and Critical Dissidence
As art theorist and cultural analyst Griselda Pollock confirmed in her recent lecture at IMMA, her enterprise has always been to navigate a critical position through dominant art historical, cultural and institutional discourses. For almost forty years Pollock has made a series of major theoretical, methodological and curatorial interventions that significantly contribute to feminist, postcolonial and queer scholarship in the arts. Alongside her longstanding collaborator Rozsika Parker, Pollock was a founding member of the Women’s Art History Collective (1972) which sought to address the omission of women’s creative practices in the art history canon. Continuing with this theme, in 1981 Pollock and Parker published Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. Providing a commentary on the modalities by which oppressive ideologies systemically engender the art history canon, Old Mistresses made a seminal contribution to feminist art historical critique by investigating the structural hierarchies of the canon that contribute to the exclusion of women artists in specific ways.

In her lecture, delivered in response to IMMA’s current exhibition entitled The Passion According to Carol Rama, Pollock elaborated on this feminist methodology she has developed that probes the ways in which (i) art history is structured by dominant discourses that support masculine dominance of the canon and (ii) thereby contribute to the way in which women artists are excluded by institutional structures. She names this methodology critical dissidence, a mode of disagreement that approaches the discourses of the histories, theories and institutions of art as well as the aesthetics of creative practice from a non-androcentric, non-masculinist and non-patriarchal perspective. Continue reading Will the Mistresses Tools Dismantle the Master’s House?

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Visitors to Patrick Hennessy’s exhibition discover how unusual he was

In the next blog of our Gallery Voices series Olive Barrett, from our Visitor Engagement Team, gives us an insight into how visitors to the exhibition Patrick Hennessy De Profundis are surprised with how talented, skilled and forward thinking Hennessy actually was.

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Main image Men bathing, Étretat, c. 1954, Installation view Patrick Hennesy De Profundis IMMA 2016. Photo Jed Niezgo

The Patrick Hennessy exhibition, De Profundis, showing in the East Wing Galleries since March this year is now in its final week ending this Sunday 24 July. For many visitors to the gallery this is the first time that they have experienced Hennessy’s work and many people are of the opinion that the work is unusual for an Irish artist of his time. Patrick Hennessy was born in Cork in 1915, educated in Scotland and worked for a time under the Cubist master Fernandez Legér after winning a scholarship to Paris in 1937. The main perception from the public is that he was an artist and painter who had been forgotten about and had not readily received the acclaim that he deserved in a National Institution until now.

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Patrick Hennessy, Portrait-Figures (Self-Portrait), 1972, oil on canvas, 101.5 x 127 cm, National Gallery of Ireland Collection, Photo © National Gallery of Ireland, Photography courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland.

The admiration for his work is obvious as one is present in any one of the four rooms or along the main corridor of the exhibition. For those who were familiar with the artist’s work, they had never realised how prolific a painter he was, the high skill level and execution of his subject matter or the diverse and avant-garde manner in which he painted. Hennessy was also a gay artist who openly expressed his sexuality in his work when it was not commonplace to do so and when it was in fact illegal in the state to be gay. This has been significant to many visitors not only artistically, culturally and socially but also regarding equality in light of the recent marriage equality referendum and rights for the LGBT communities. Viewers have been overheard saying that they had not realised the symbolism surrounding the wearing of a red tie to signify male interest and sexual orientation as is seen in the paintings, Portrait-Figures (Self Portrait), 1972, and the recent addition to the exhibition, Portrait of a Young Man. Continue reading Visitors to Patrick Hennessy’s exhibition discover how unusual he was

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Patrick Hennessy and the power of artworks

In the most recent installment of our Curator’s Voice series, IMMA Curator Seán Kissane observes how his own relationship with artworks in the exhibition Patrick Hennessy De Profundis has changed over the course of the show and how conversations with visitors, peers and friends has resulted in some powerful and compelling responses to the emotional subject matter of the paintings.

 

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Patrick Hennessy, Seán Alone, 1977, oil on canvas, 38.1 x 60.9 cm, Private Collection

One of the most rewarding aspects of curating an exhibition is observing the ways in which one’s relationship with individual works changes over the course of the show. The conversations one has with visitors, peers and friends constantly challenge and enrich the interpretations that may have been formed in the course of research. The Patrick Hennessy show has been no exception. As it deals with emotional subject matters like sexual orientation, psychological alienation and coming out; some of the responses I’ve heard have been powerful and compelling. One quiet little work in particular has provoked much discussion. By co-incidence it is entitled Seán Alone and Hennessy painted it shortly before he died. It shows an adolescent boy sitting by the side of a canal, looking after a pile of clothes as his friends swim boisterously in the water. I had always seen this image as representing psychological isolation, although he is surrounded by his peers, the title tells us that the protagonist is alone. I imagined Seán’s thought processes, his awareness of his difference and how the weight of that gradually increased over time to that point at which it became unbearable and his journey of coming-out would begin.
During the exhibition other gay men have read the work in more physical and literal ways. They focused on the fact that Seán remains fully-clothed as his friends went swimming. One man said this resonated with him, because as a teenager he didn’t like to take off his clothes. He was attracted to one of his close friends and was ashamed that he couldn’t control the unwelcome responses of his body – added to this his ‘response’ might have had negative consequences. Another man described how as a teenager he was very thin. He didn’t like to show his body because he thought that somehow his ‘weak’ body betrayed him, that his other ‘weakness’ would be revealed. At our recent seminar, Sexuality, Identity and the State some of these ideas were teased out by a number of psychoanalysts who responded to Hennessy’s images. As a reflection of their professional practice, they looked for emotional insights in the faces of his sitters, and in particular Continue reading Patrick Hennessy and the power of artworks

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Memorial Gardens

IMMA recently invited writer Sue Rainsford to respond to Niamh O’Malley’s The Memorial Gardens, 2008, which is featured in our current exhibition IMMA Collection: A Decade. The response is in the context of Art | Memory | Place, a year-long programme focusing on artists whose work addresses themes relating to memory and place. 

Made in 2008, while participating in IMMA’s Artist Residency Programme, The Memorial Gardens by Niamh O’Malley is an installation comprising footage taken at the National War Memorial Gardens in Islandbridge, Dublin, projected onto oil on etched-primed aluminium.

What can we ascertain of the human gaze and the shadow it casts? Or of memory, that diaphanous veil that shrouds even the most vibrant recollections? Continue reading Memorial Gardens

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Holding on to nothing

Carol Rama, "Appassionata Passionate", 1943

We recently invited artist Teresa Gillespie to respond to a current IMMA exhibition by influential Italian artist Carol Rama (1918 – 2014) entitled; The Passion According to Carol Rama (IMMA Main Galleries until 1 August 2016). An excerpt from Teresa’s response is below, and the full text can be be read by clicking through to the PDF below. Teresa will also perform as part of Listen, Hissen, Hessin!, a one-night roving soundscape taking place within the Carol Rama exhibition at IMMA on Wednesday 22 June 2016.

When something is cut, something flows.
When Rama speaks, she cuts her own flows, turns left, does u-turns, spins round. She produces disorientation and disperses herself. She’s not going here or there, not becoming this or that. I wake up with the words ‘freedom to be no one’ in my head, from the Xenofeminisim Manifesto. But I misremember the words, which actually read, ‘the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular.’ I’m jealous of Rama’s loose tongue, how it splits and twists through contradictions. She practices the freedom of detachment. There is nothing to hold on to. She drops a thought as quickly as she picks up another one. The story goes that because there are so many stories, Rama is a secret onto herself, but perhaps Rama’s secret is a hole.
I’m a doughnut. Eat my flesh.

Read more of Teresa’s response here. Please note this text includes language which may not be suitable for younger readers.

Teresa Gillespie is an artist based in Dublin. She works across a number of mediums including sculpture, video, sound and text. Recent solo projects include ‘moot’ ArtBox, Dublin (2015); ‘below explanation (clocks stop at 3pm and existence continues)’, Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford (2015); and ‘return to the borderland bends’, John Jones Project Space, London (2014). She has exhibited in numerous group shows in Ireland and internationally, and undertaken artist residencies such as Frankfurter Kunstverein Deutsche Borse Program. www.teresagillespie.com
The Passion According to Carol Rama is at IMMA from 24 March – 1 August 2016.