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‘Reflections on a Radical Plot’, Charlotte Salter-Townshend in conversation with Clodagh Emoe

In this article, Charlotte Salter-Townshend writes about the biodiversification of IMMA’s artist in-residence Clodagh Emoe’s sited project Crocosmia ×. Reflections on a Radical Plot offers insights into the journey and multifaceted engagements of Crocosmia × woven together with histories, folklore, and symbolism of Crocosmia and the various species of plants which have presented themselves in the plot on IMMA’s front lawn. Encouraging nature to take its course, the text prompts notions of what it means to journey somewhere unintended, the celebration of inclusivity and being as a process. A short film of the same title, Reflections on a Radical Plot by Emoe contextualises the journey of the project to date, as IMMA on a new pilot project titled Seed STUDIO growing from this time and research. 

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Introduction

Clodagh Emoe creates works that explore how meaning is formed through our connection with each other and the natural world. Her collaborative project, The Plurality of Existence… (2015-2018) with individuals seeking asylum led organically to Crocosmia ×,  a participatory project that was also developed and realised with individuals seeking asylum. Crocosmia × was commissioned by ‘…the lives we live” Grangegorman Public Art and supported by IMMA. The artwork Crocosmia × found a natural home in IMMA, as a plot of wildflowers on the lawn of this stately building.

When sitting by this artwork I am reminded of the concept of biophilia. Biologist Edward O. Wilson defines biophilia as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life”[1]. Humans possess an innate tendency to seek connections with nature and other forms of life. Studies indicate the value of plants both wild and cultivated on human well-being. Increasingly, researchers acknowledge the importance of daily contact with nature. Even the ‘plucky plants’[i] that find their niche in urban environments have manifold positive effects. Growing on walls, in gutters, between cracks in the pavement, and along railway lines, these wild plants provide much needed refuge and food for animals including pollinators, but they also have a positive effect on human well-being. If our built up areas were suddenly stripped of all green living things, we would lose an oft overlooked but vital connection to the natural world. Wilson calls for humans to leave aside half the Earth’s land and sea in order to reverse the biodiversity crisis and ensure species have the space they need to thrive.[2] However, given the increasing urbanisation of the globe, cities must also play a central role in the conservation of global biodiversity. We must allow space for wild species to thrive alongside people in our urban environments.

Crocosmia × is most vibrant in late Summer, when the vibrant orange flowers of Crocosmia × crocosmiiflora are in bloom. Planted by Clodagh, Hallah Farhan Dawood, Ragad Farhan Dawood, Papy Kahoya Kasongo, Romeo Kibambe Kitenge, Marie Claire Mundi Njong, Siniša Končić,, Fatemeh, Mohamad, and friends, it is a gentle reminder and a positive symbol of the challenges and obstacles overcome by those displaced by political, social, and environmental issues. Crocosmia × symbolises the persevering spirit of plants and people who make Ireland their home.

Primrose companion print photo by Clodagh Emoe

From The Plurality of Existence… to Reflections on a Radical Plot

 The Plurality of Existence… is collaborative art project that Clodagh initiated with a group of individuals seeking asylum in Ireland in partnership with Spirasi. Many of the group were living within the system of Direct Provision. Spirasi is Ireland’s only organization helping survivors of torture who are asylum seekers, refugees, or other disadvantaged migrant groups. As outlined in her essays on this multi-layered project and through our conversations, I learn that her motivation for initiating the project was to create a space of representation, a space to “re-present hidden narratives from the unique perspective of those who are not represented in, or by, the legislative, cultural and political frameworks within our society” and how she wanted to “create a space in the public realm for the voice of the asylum seekers and migrants living in Ireland and draw attention to the plight of so many enduring the system of direct provision”.[3] Clodagh established a gardening group which she maintains set the foundations of the project by establishing a “shared space”.[4] Clodagh speaks of their finding a corm of the plant Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora, a hybrid of two African species that is found all over Ireland (commonly known here as Montbretia, back-to-school flower, and fealeastram dearg). The group formalised their collaboration with the name Crocosmia because they believed that it offered a “symbol of hope for the group, after being themselves uprooted and forced to leave their homeland and create a new life for themselves in a foreign land”. [5]  The Crocosmia collaborators are: Marie Claire Mundi Njong (Cameroon), Siniša Končić (former Yugoslavia), Jean-Marie Rukundo Phillemon (Rwanda), Annet Mphahlele (Uganda), Saida Umar (Pakistan), and Peter Rukundo (Rwanda).  Members of Crocosmia began writing poems. These poems informed a series of site-specific work –  poems of Crocosmia, recited in the writers’ native language and English, echoing across  rivers in Cork, Carlow, Dublin, and Galway. An anthology of the poems of Crocosmia was launched in 2017 with proceeds going directly to MASI (Movement of Asylum Seekers Ireland).[6]

Thus opened a new chapter, leading to the project Crocosmia ×, which extended out to the wider community. The poems of Crocosmia were exchanged for specimens of the Crocosmia × crocosmiiflora with gardeners all over Ireland. These plants and the poems of Crocosmia were used in workshops to explore Crocosmia × as a metaphor for diversity in Ireland with children and young people in local schools.  “By gathering, nurturing and planting Crocosmia × crocosmiiflora in local schools and on site in Grangegorman and IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern art) we aim to promote this wild flower common to Irish roadsides and native to South Africa as a new metaphor for diversity in Ireland that questions received notions of what is ‘native’ and what is ‘foreign’.”[7]

Crocosmia × refers to Crocosmia × crocosmiiflora, a hybrid of two African species. The genus name Crocosmia comes from the Greek ‘krokos’ (saffron) + ‘osme’ (smell). It is a member of the Iris family. In 1880 in France, Victor Lemoine hybridised Crocosmia aurea and Crocosmia pottsii. C. aurea is a woodland plant while C. pottsii grows in nutrient-rich ground near streams. The resulting hybrid likes damp ground and sunshine. It became a successful and popular Victorian era garden plant, a feature in the best herbaceous borders in Britain and Ireland. However, some gardeners found it spread too quickly, forming large clumps. It spreads vegetatively via corms, a bulb-like organ. The plants and corms were dumped in hedgerows and soon became a feature of countryside roads and railway tracks in Ireland. By the early 1930s, according to Sylvia Reynolds (A Catalogue of Alien Plants in Ireland, 2002) it was frequent in the wild.

Today it is as ubiquitous as Fuchsia magellanica, a garden escapee of Chilean origin that has become a symbol for West Cork. Both Crocosmia × crocosmiiflora and Fuchsia magellanica are classified as invasive plants, but are not treated in the same way as Himalayan balsam or Japanese knotweed. Perhaps this is because they do not encroach but coexist with their neighbours. The terms native and invasive are both subject to debate even in scientific discussion. Ask a botanist what native means and they say consistently present in a given geological timeframe. In Ireland, we typically say present since at least the recolonization of plants at the end of the last Ice Age. Some plants remained here throughout the Ice Age. Some died out and were reintroduced by people later on. Should they be considered as natives? The term is not necessarily a fixed one. Invasive refers to species that are introduced and have a tendency to spread to an extent that causes damage to the environment, human economy, or human health. There are widely divergent perceptions amongst plant researchers. Native species can themselves overpopulate and become invasive – for example, the Burren is an area particularly rich in plant diversity, due in part to the control of the native hazel scrub through centuries of agriculture. In Ireland, there are no fully natural grasslands (like the savannah in Africa) – rather, the removal of woodland in the past sometimes allowed for specialist species of wildflowers to find their niche in open areas. Of course, grassland biodiversity has come under threat ever since the ‘green revolution’ in agricultural practice. Context is key for every case.

In the Crocosmia × project, parallels are drawn with different cultures that have entered Ireland. As the world becomes smaller, and people and plants are on the move more and more, what is the definition of native and invasive? The mission of botanic gardens, according to Botanic Gardens Congress International, is to protect and promote diversity of plants for the well-being of people and planet. To this end, every plant type is precious.

Since the Crocosmia × plot was planted at IMMA in 2018, other plants have self-seeded there, brought in from large garden estates, rural farms, suburban gardens, and inner city backyards with the specimens of Crocosmia × crocosmiiflora that were exchanged for the poems of Crocosmia. The appearance of new plants has also resulted from seeds dispersed by the animals and birds that use and pass through this plot, a site in flux, ever changing. When speaking to Clodagh she remarks excitedly on this unanticipated outcome. How it surprised her particularly because Crocosmia × crocosmiiflora is deemed ‘invasive’ by the Department of Agriculture and yet here we see a diverse range of plants in harmonious coexistence.  She remarks on this “quiet progression” and how this exposes the idea of diversity that informed this artwork. For Clodagh this development “makes sense” in the way that it demonstrates her understanding of art as an “open process”, a thing that evolves and is never fixed, as she maintains, “it’s art’s resistance to order that allows us to formulate our own meaning, presenting moments of potential that ‘invite’ thought”.[8]

Corpo Bin large print set up

Ordering nature

 Human tendency is to generalise and categorise things, in order to comprehend and recall the great diversity of the natural world. In the 18th century, Carolus Linnaeus revolutionized the field of natural history by introducing a formalized system of naming organisms – taxonomic nomenclature. He divided the natural world into kingdoms and used ranks such as class, order, genus, species, and variety. With new discoveries and understanding over the intervening years, the system has been refined, with countless organisms added or reclassified. Despite its utility, taxonomic nomenclature is a human invention and not an objective reality – living things will always skirt and subvert our expectations and categories.

Despite the scientific method’s emphasis on objectivity, scientific institutions are subject to bias. The language of nomenclature belies its European colonialist and patriarchal origins, using terms such as kingdom. With the advent of an official scientific naming system, ordering and defining nature often developed as a way of controlling things – the colonial mind-set was to control nature as well as people. Naming is power. As Linnaeus declared: ‘God created, Linnaeus named’. Unfortunately, a lot of folk knowledge of the natural world has been lost over the years. In Ireland for example, countless traditional uses of plants for food, medicine, and more was not recorded and was forgotten through the decline of the Irish language, famine, emigration, and other processes. We are fortunate to have some information preserved. The work of Irish Folklore Commission in 1937-38 instigated the collection of folklore throughout the National Schools of 26 counties. One hundred thousand children gathered more than a half a million pages. It was of paramount importance in recording many things, including folk remedies and local lore. Reflections on a Radical Plot, engages with this aim to preserve. Clodagh endeavours to identify and archive acknowledge of these plants and their value. Plants referenced in the collection of folklore are brought back to our attention in her organic, ghostlike prints of nettle, forget-me-not, primrose, herb Robert, ribwort plantain, nipplewort, prickly sow thistle, common thistle, opium poppy, wild violet, and western willow herb.

Nettles are nutritious and are an example of food as medicine: “Three doses of nettles in the month of April will prevent any disease for the rest of the year”.[9] Nettles are also vital for wildlife, the leaves providing food for the caterpillars of small tortoiseshell, comma, red admiral, and peacock butterfly. The stinging hairs protect the plant from grazers, allowing all sorts of insect life to thrive undisturbed. Nipplewort is a ‘weed’ of cereal crops. It has become less frequent with modern agricultural practices. The flower buds were thought to resemble nipples. Hence, it was believed to help heal sore nipples. This is an example of a theory known as the doctrine of signatures, popular in medieval times. Willowherb is also known as fireweed, because it grew where bombs had struck during the Blitz in London. It is a plant symbolic of upheaval and survival. Dandelions are considered the classic ‘weed’. Originating in Europe and Asia, it is estimated that dandelions have been in cultivation since the Roman times.  They are used as remedies for illnesses including liver problems, gastrointestinal distress, fluid retention, and skin ailments. The plant is also a tasty and highly nutritious vegetable.  During the seventeenth century, European colonists introduced dandelions to North America. Native American peoples also developed their own uses of the dandelion after it naturalised.

Prints on drying rack photo by Clodagh Emoe

Being as a process

 For the purposes of scientific record, botanists and collectors press and preserve plants as herbarium specimens. Bridging across science and art, botanic artists paint plants with great accuracy and detail. Clodagh develops this further, using unique ecological printing process that captures an image of the subject using the very essence of the plants. What appears as a mirror image reveals the trace of natural dye from the front and back of the plant left on each page, a duality presenting the plants’ dimension and depth, like the poetry of the asylum seekers who collaborated in The Plurality of Existence… and Crocosmia ×. This ecological printing process captures the complexity of these plants, revealing that being is a process in constant flux and in dialogue with the environment. At times, plants are potential, lying dormant in the soil. Later, they decay and return to the earth, showing us that death is just a part of the life cycle. “Deep in their roots all flowers keep the light” – Theodore Roethke.[10]

Plants challenge our notion of individuals. Clodagh’s prints show that each plant has characteristics outside of its species designation. Yet according to the definition of individual, plants do not qualify. An individual is characterized by the fact that it is indivisible: if you cut it in two, you kill it. However, if you cut a plant in two, it does not die. You can propagate plants this way, such when the Crocosmia × crocosmiiflora were divided and shared in the community for Crocosmia ×. Now a variety of other plants have joined the Crocosmia x plot. They were not sown by human hands but arrived of their own accord. Their seeds blew in on the wind or were dropped by animals. The plants have made the plot their home and now they form a community which will endure with new additions and future generations of plants. When viewing the plot at IMMA, we see a habitat where the lines between individuals are blurred. It is a microcosm of the larger environment. As Siniša Končić’s poem Vukovar, Croatia goes: “One bench. All my world.”[11]

In recent times, efforts are made to establish that diversity is the natural state of being. Each living thing has relationships with those around it. We are only scratching the surface of the depth of the symbiosis between living things. To this end, we must see both the wood and the trees as part of an intricate tapestry, a “plurality of existence”.[12]

[1] Wilson, E.O., 1984. Biophilia. Harvard University Press.

[2] Wilson, E.O., 2016. Half-earth: our planet’s fight for life. WW Norton & Company.

[3] Emoe, C “The Plurality of Existence… ”, 2020. New Cartographies, Nomadic Methodologies: Contemporary Arts, Culture and Politics in Ireland, ed. Anne Goarzin & Maria Parsons, Peter Lang, London, Oxford, New York.

[4] Emoe, C., 2020. “Approaching an Understanding of Place”, Public Art Now, ed. Haughton and Keeve, GGDA.

[5] The Plurality of Existence in the Infinite Expanse of Space and Time, 2017. ed. Clodagh Emoe, Dublin.

[6] MASI is an independent platform for asylum seekers to join together in unity and purpose.  The collective seeks justice, freedom and dignity for all asylum seekers. https://www.masi.ie/

[7] Emoe, C., 2022. Crocosmia ×. https://www.clodaghemoe.com/

[8] Emoe C., 2014. Exploring the Philosophical Character of Contemporary Art Through a Post-Conceptual Practice, PhD. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/appadoc/51/

[9] UCD (2022). National Folklore Collection Schools. https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4713251/4711478/4715049

[10] Mabey, R. and Sinclair, I., 1973. The unofficial countryside. London: Collins.

[11] Končić S., 2017. “Vukovar, Croatia” from, The Plurality of Existence in the Infinite Expanse of Space and Time ed. Clodagh Emoe, Dublin.

[12]  Emoe C., 2017. “Foreword” from The Plurality of Existence in the Infinite Expanse of Space and Time ed. Clodagh Emoe, Dublin.

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VENTURING ON DANGEROUS GROUND by Dr Patricia Shaw

IMMA commissioned this magazine article by Dr Patricia Shaw on the occasion of the recent acquisition of Marie Brett’s new work Yes, But Do You Care? to the IMMA Collection. This work was made during Brett’s residency at IMMA over the period of 2019 – 2022.

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The filmwork Yes, But Do You Care? , held in the IMMA National Collection is the last piece in a three-part series that builds on Marie Brett’s earlier film E.gress. E.gress is a haunting evocation of the experience of those living with the profoundly altered relationship to memory and world that we call dementia. Researching that piece, through her collborative social arts practice, brought Brett into contact with the carers, largely family members, who also live with dementia on a daily basis. E.gress was purchased for The Arts Council/An Chomharlie Ealaion collection in 2017  and shortly afterwards IMMA invited Brett to take up an Artists Residency that enabled her to research further the hidden aspects of carers’ experience that she was glimpsing. Further impetus for the work came as new legislation, in the form of the Irish Capacity Act, first drafted in 2015 and still not on the statutes at the time of writing, attempts to strengthen the ability of people to decide and act for themselves as far as their capacity allows, a move that leaves carers in an ever more difficult position. Brett collaborated with dancer/choreographer Philip Connaughton to produce first a live performed installation and then this filmic work. Yes, But Do You Care? involved considerable contribution from the Dementia Carers Campaign Network supported by The Alzheimer Society of Ireland and probes the profoundly disturbing questions raised by the ‘human right to make a bad decision’.

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Brett: “I am trying for the work to be as brave as it can be.”

What kind of courage does an artist ask of herself, her collaborators and contributors, and now of her viewing public, that may combine to make a work brave? What fears need to be overcome? And what might be gained by such bravery?

These are questions worth exploring when an artist works with subject matter that we collectively shy away from, that we knowingly and unknowingly, relegate to the periphery of our social, cultural or political vision. When invited to give such material our full attention, the relationship between artist and viewer is a testing negotiation taking place through the work.

It begins with the title. Yes, But Do You Care? What do you know of caring? What do you care to know? Of what are you willing to speak? Yes, but, yes, but – each train of thought interrupted by simultaneous acknowledgement and an alternative point of view.  Buckshot sprays of colliding concerns in which carers stand. Legislation painstakingly attempting to delineate between care for, and possible abuse of the personal rights of those whose capacity to decide for themselves is in question. “We are both dodging bullets,” says a dementia carer struggling literally with the not so simple act of helping an unwilling adult clean himself up. As a viewer, am I prepared to walk this terrain and meet its acute and lonely dilemmas?

Marie Brett, Yes, But Do You Care?, 2021, single channel video, 10 min duration, IMMA Collection, Purchase 2021.

The film opens in a large field of grassy tussocks under a sombre sky, where a solitary figure is dancing – agitated gestures that twist and turn on themselves. I register behind him the many blank windows of some institutional building. I am struck by how alone the figure seems. When we leave the open field, it is for settings that are domestic and queasily unsettling. These are intimate settings, at home, in what are usually safe spaces, yet here, they seem filled with unease: a hard tiled wall with grab handles; a livid green armchair on a patterned carpet; a bathroom with toilet, basin and commode. And always that solitary dancer, moving in striking repetitive sequences.

And two voices speaking. The first voice relates the testimony of the carers, those looking after family members with dementia. I catch one brief but detailed scene after another ……after another. A tangle of rolling pins, missing limbs, tussles and cups of tea, all joined up by the same candid, informal and unemphatic tones. A second voice enters, annunciating sentences that are extracts of the proposed Irish Capacity Act. Her diction is as crisp and precise as the legal language, picking its rational way through great complexities.  The voices alternate, and sometimes overlay, and occasionally go quiet. Just as the lone dancer in the field stands still for a long moment half-way through the film, a tiny pulse in his jaw.

Marie Brett, Yes, But Do You Care?, 2021, single channel video, 10 min duration, IMMA Collection, Purchase 2021.

Assailed simultaneously by the voices, the stark narratives, Brett’s use of overlays and split screen scenes to frame Connaughton’s magnetic yet ambiguous movement, I am initially strangely paralysed of mind and heart. I could stop at the surface. Yes, but, enough!  Or yes, but, I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to tease these dilemmas apart. I am fearful, both of what I am being asked to look at and reluctant to make the judgement calls that are buried in the very fabric of these scenes. But it is already too late, echoes have been sounded in my mind that I cannot ignore. Thus begins the next negotiation.

Brett is a visual artist whose filmic works, immersive installations and live events, (Last Breath, The Day-Crossing Farm, On The Edge of My Sky) draw her public into exploring terrain that feels dangerous, not because it involves adventuring to alien places, but rather because it is so close at hand, hidden in plain sight, at home, next door. Terrain full of perilous fears because clear moral signposts are absent, ambiguous or contradictory. Going there is like walking into a social mist, we must venture there alone, just as Brett’s subjects are often alone. The work asks us to meet something we may only have a glancing awareness of, but this is not full-frontal presentation of an issue, a view, an opinion. Brett’s social arts practice involves her in careful and intensive collaborations to probe territory with those who know it well, testing out what they will trust her with, what they themselves will gain courage together to bring to light. She then assembles an artwork as a particular aesthetic vision of that terrain and invites the public to walk into and though it, sometimes literally, always discerningly, as an immersive experience. We must negotiate our own way through the material she offers, ready to reappraise what we thought we knew, be thoroughly disconcerted, be willing to shift our ground. All this is what makes Brett’s work active as it enters the public domain, and this is more relevant than attempts to position her as an arts activist, a position she herself does not take or seek.

Marie Brett, Yes, But Do You Care?, 2021, single channel video, 10 min duration, IMMA Collection, Purchase 2021.

This venturing further into the work means being willing to watch again, and yet again, Then the voices, the repeating gestures and movements began to inter-penetrate and permeate, and I begin to perceive more of the experience of dementia carers. A truculent head stares out of a tiled cubicle, moving from side to side in strange, unnerving ways. A memory flashes of holding a tortoise in my hands as a child, watching the head waggling in its carapace. Trapped or sheltered? Defying or appealing? A figure runs on the spot, continuous exertion that does not get anywhere. Exhausting. I see he is boxed in, but by a window, flooded with light. The bright gaze (of a societal, legal world he is answerable to, perhaps) reduces a human person to a stick figure, vapourises flesh to a marionette. I start thinking about inhabiting the uncomfortable power relations that these circumstances involve.

Marie Brett, Yes, But Do You Care?, 2021, single channel video, 10 min duration, IMMA Collection, Purchase 2021.

We have become all too familiar with the potential for abuse in heavily tilted power relations. Our society is wounded by revelations from so many settings where we assume care and safety, and find instead vulnerable people in peril. Within religious orders and their flock; in therapeutic consulting rooms; between bosses and junior staff at work; between staff and the elderly in nursing homes, we learn of ongoing harm being done. But, in all these circumstances it is clear who needs protection, who needs support, and our legal and professional regulatory frameworks attempt to secure that safety. But here, something else is insidiously in play.

I am reminded of Stephen Karpman’s study of the classic fairy tales of the brothers Grimm, related to his work in family therapy. He perceived certain toxic patterns arising wherever relationships of need and care morph into dysfunctionality. He proposed the idea of a triangular psychological/emotional ‘game board’ where 3 roles, taken up by 2 or more players, those of persecutor, victim and rescuer, do not hold steady, but slide unnervingly from one to another. For example, someone steps into a situation to help another, thinking they know what is needed. Disconcertingly they may find themselves accused; they feel suddenly trapped or impotent, or they become angry and are appalled to find themselves seen as persecutors themselves; confusingly they now feel they are the ones needing help. However the game unfolds, it always produces the same bad-tasting pay-off of anger, anguish, blame and shame. Karpman’s work spawned an industry of coaching and self help to show people how to stay off this game board in their everyday lives.

Marie Brett, Yes, But Do You Care?, 2021, single channel video, 10 min duration, IMMA Collection, Purchase 2021.

Venturing still further, I see that Brett’s film exposes yet a different twist in the scenes of family dementia care, where Karpman’s suggestions for remedying dysfunctional relationships become more difficult to apply. The capacity of the person needing care, ebbs and flows, in a way that means the world they inhabit shifts, gaps open up, into which perturbed and disturbing fears swell, where perceptions distort as in curved fairground mirrors. A Jekyll and Hyde world where a carer offering a cup of tea to her mother agonises over whether her voice tone might be the difference between a smile and a thank you, or a severe blow. And the sibling she turns to for understanding says, shocked, ‘Oh but Mammy would never do that!’ Where a carer helping someone in the bathroom, finds themselves struggling forcibly with a large, strong adult who suddenly wants no help, no longer knows who the carer is. Suddenly I glimpse what it could be like to find myself starting an action in one world of sense and completing it in quite another world, unsure when the switch occurred. And what it could be like to have to account for my judgements in a different world yet again, to the one in which those judgements arose. Brett superposes on the innocuous image of a living room armchair, multiple wraith-like images of the dancer, so that he flows between standing behind it, kneeling before it, sitting on it, struggling to escape being trapped beneath it, or toppling into the sudden dark abyss of its seat. As I view the film repeatedly I find myself wondering: when we talk of dementia ‘sufferers’, who is who? How would  I carry the torment of failure, frustration, isolation, self-doubt that brews under the apparent normality of the world in which professional and legislative frameworks attempt to define important responsibilities and rights?

Marie Brett, Yes, But Do You Care?, 2021, single channel video, 10 min duration, IMMA Collection, Purchase 2021.

I have asked what makes a work brave and what makes it active?

Brett’s contributors did not shy away from agreeing to share the more difficult and ambivalent material of their lives. Connaughton does more than portray, he vividly enacts, the hidden lonely tensions of the dementia caring experience so we sense and recognise them in our own bodies. Brett herself does not falter in daring to show the edge of anger and anguished affection along which those with a duty of care, a bond of love to care, try to keep a footing. So yes, here is a courageous work.

If, as viewers, we dare to tread in these footsteps then we are presented with our next negotiation with the work: what are we to do with what we now see? What makes this work potentially active is that it does not present a clear problem nor advocate a solution, but rather asks how we keep seeing in the round, from every perspective, the unstable other-worldly circumstances in which dementia carers accompany those they care for. This is what makes us feel we are venturing on dangerous ground as viewers, a ground of shifting risks and ethical double binds. The temptation hovers to ignore or downplay, to take a one sided position, to hope that generalised protocols can take away the need for uniquely difficult judgement calls.

If suffering breeds in the stagnant corners of our society’s attention then an active work moves us from spectators, on-lookers, by-standers, by stirring a sense of recognition of certain experiences as potentially active in our own lives. According to Hannah Arendt  being able and willing to speak together in the round of our plural experiences of a common world, is the only way we keep that world humane, continuously raising questions about how the regulatory, legislatory, professional and institutional worlds we sustain together are serving all those who live together in that world. This tests our maturity as a society as the complex tensions can never be resolved once and for all, but demand our ongoing care and vigilance from ever differing perspectives. Yes, But Do You Care? contributes to developing that kind of enlarged mentality, that mitigates the always present risk of leaving some amongst us, in this case dementia carers, to twist and turn alone.

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A solo exhibition by Marie Brett, titled The Hidden Mountain, the Fort and the Five Trees, will take place at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Co Cork from 23 March to 15 October 2022. The most comprehensive presentation of Brett’s work to date the exhibition includes a newly commissioned artwork in the Centre Gallery, Ritual of Stone and Water: Pilgrimage to the Ninth Wave Multiverse – this is a scaled-down replica of a grain silo with light, quartz, charcoal, video, a quadrophonic soundscape and tree stump. In the East Gallery there is a collection of five large scale pieces reimagined through artifacts, documentation and a series of new text pieces which runs until 27 August. The film, Yes, But Do You Care? will be screened in the West Gallery from 27 Aug to 15 Oct.

On 21 July IMMA will screen the film as part of the IMMA Nights programme.

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Exhibition Design
The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene

Design plays an intricate and emotive role throughout the galleries of the museum-wide exhibition The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now. From raw red tones and icy cold blues to the textured surface of the hanging curtains, each chapter of this exhibition features a bespoke design tailored to it’s theme. In this article, Claire Walsh, Assistant Curator: Collections, talks through the design approach for  Chapter Two: The Anthropocene of The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now. 

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The exhibition design for The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now was developed by the collaborative architecture and design practice led by Jo Anne Butler and Tara Kennedy. From the early stages, we worked closely with them to create a visual language that would be legible across the four chapters of the exhibition. Our initial prompt was that the exhibition would explore the past thirty years through themes that traverse the political, the planetary and the personal.

Installation view The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene, IMMA, Dublin, 2021. Photo Ros Kavanagh.

They responded with a colour palette of reds and blues – reflecting political campaigns (blue vs red), planetary warming (blue to red) and the blurring of gender identities (blue and pink merging into purple). Alongside the colour scheme, they proposed installing curtains at intervals throughout the galleries that would break up the familiar identities of the spaces, soften edges and create new vistas and pathways. Where we would traditionally build temporary walls to create additional rooms and block light for moving image works, the curtains offered us a more flexible and sustainable option.

Installation view The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene, IMMA, Dublin, 2021. Photo Ros Kavanagh.

While the four chapters contain these design elements, a bespoke approach was developed for each. Reflecting the theme of The Anthropocene*, the designers based the colour palette of Chapter Two on the coldest and hottest places on earth (‘glacier’ blues on the lower levels and ‘desert’ oranges upstairs). The burnt oranges also reference another key theme of the exhibition which looks at the relationship between the Museum and the Anthropocene.

Installation view The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene, IMMA, Dublin, 2021. Photo Ros Kavanagh.

With the terracotta walls imitating the John Soane Museum in London and its classic 19th century museum interiors. Echoing the cooling and warming of the planet, Butler and Kennedy suggested using an ombre effect with the paint to create a feeling of transition within the exhibition. The walls of a room on the ground floor, densely filled with collection works, fade from icy blue up to white as if an invisible tide has gone out. Upstairs, the inverse – deep shades of orange rise like heat to the top of a white wall. To reach the final room of the show in the basement level, visitors descend the stairs into a glacial blue space.

Installation view The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene, IMMA, Dublin, 2021. Photo Ros Kavanagh.

Stopping at a level height that appears as a flood line, the paint creates a ‘subaquatic’ atmosphere for the film installation situated within. Canvas-coloured curtains punctuate the rooms across the three floors of The Anthropocene. Together these design elements form a stage for the artworks, extending the ideas of the exhibition and generating an atmospheric journey through it for visitors.

Installation view The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene, IMMA, Dublin, 2021. Photo Ros Kavanagh.

* The Anthropocene considers the present geological era in which human activity is recognised as a dominant and destructive influence on the Earth’s systems.

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The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene is on view at IMMA until end of 2022, to visit please click here to book your free ticket.

The other three Chapters are also available to visit Chapter Two: Queer Embodiment until 15 May 2022, and Chapter Three: Social Fabric and Chapter Four: Protest and Conflict until end of 2022.

 

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IMMA | Irish Research Council Enterprise Postdoctoral Fellow Stephen O’Neill

‘Research is central to the work of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and thanks to funding from the Irish Research Council, IMMA is benefitting from the knowledge and skills of a number of research fellows. The first recipient of an Irish Research Council Enterprise Postdoctoral Fellowship at IMMA was Dr Nathan O’Donnell, 2018-2019, in connection with the IMMA Collection: Freud Project. As a Research Fellow at IMMA, Nathan co-organised several events and symposia dedicated to Freud’s work, as well as working as a curatorial researcher for exhibitions in connection with the Freud Project.

For 2021-2022 we are delighted to support two additional Research Fellows. Dr Stephen O’Neill has been awarded an Irish Research Council Enterprise Postdoctoral Fellowship to work with IMMA and Trinity College Dublin (TCD) over a two-year period, focusing on the cultural history of the period 1919-1950 and the impact of partition. Séamus Nolan, has been awarded an Irish Research Council Doctoral Fellowship to work with IMMA and NCAD for a four-year period focusing on historic processes of collecting relative to minority ethnic groups. In this article Dr Stephen O’Neill will provide an outline of his research project in IMMA over the next two years.’

Lisa Moran, Curator, Engagement & Learning, IMMA

 

‘The Irish Research Council (IRC) is the national funder of excellent research across all disciplines. It invests in discovery research and in ground-breaking ideas that address major societal challenges, funding a diverse range of excellent individual researchers across all career stages. The IRC nurtures the skills development of excellent early-stage researchers and cultivates independent thinkers by offering a range of opportunities supporting diverse career paths. The IRC is delighted to support Stephen’s postdoctoral research, in partnership with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which will explore the cultural history of partition in Ireland. Stephen is using a dynamic interdisciplinary approach to understand the repercussions of partition on Irish identity, culture and society.

The IRC’s enterprise programmes (Employment-Based Postgraduate Programme and the Enterprise Partnership Scheme) are tailored to provide excellent early-stage researchers with vital experience working with an organisation relevant to their field of research. These schemes enable knowledge exchange and collaboration with government departments and agencies, enterprise and civic society. For enterprise and employers, these schemes provide a low-risk, flexible route to research, talent and innovation in an area closely aligned with their strategic interests.‘

Peter Brown, Director, Irish Research Council

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William Conor, The Air Raid Warden (Robinson Clever’s Roof), Coloured crayons, 44.5 x 34.9 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Heritage Gift from the McClelland Collection by Noel and Anne Marie Smyth, 2004.

I have just begun a two-year Irish Research Council Enterprise Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. During this time, I’ll be finishing my book project on culture and partition under the mentorship of Dr Tom Walker at Trinity College Dublin. I will also be working at IMMA with Dr Lisa Moran and the Engagement and Learning Department to develop a series of events in the context of IMMA’s three-year commemoration programme focusing on the theme of self-determination, as well as researching the history of the site of the museum and the Royal Hospital Kilmainham as it has been inhabited for nearly a millennium.

While my research has previously focused on Anglophone Irish writing and its connections to the history of Ireland in the twentieth century, in recent years I have also turned towards visual culture, and particularly representations of the state in literature and art in that period. As a challenge to the widely expressed belief that this partition was the result of intractable and longstanding cultural differences between north and south, I am currently thinking about how Irish culture has been affected by the island’s partition since 1920. The division of the island provided both states with a productive coherence from which they could construct their traditions and establish their aesthetics in these early years.

The link between partition and the construction of these states is not readily apparent – or at least, it is not frequently mentioned either in academic histories or in displays of public memory. Instead, and both as a place of physical curiosity and a marker of political and social divides, the border on the island has been the overwhelming focus for politicians, writers, and artists. As perhaps the most tangible and easily identifiable aspect of partition, the border has served as a metaphor for the wider impacts of the island’s division, often to the detriment of a more complex engagement with its ongoing effects.

Yet alongside different histories and chronologies of their gestation, each state adopted and propagated distinctive emblems and logos in the first years of partition. Alongside these icons – the harp and the red hand, the industrial city of Belfast and the rural west coast, the shipyard workman and the island fisherman – the map of Ireland also became a weapon in the Irish question, deployed to lay claims towards territory and tradition on the island. In many respects these images and symbols were also the clearest distillations of ‘Irish’ or ‘Ulster’ culture and society, furnishing national flags, various state publications, commissioned paintings, coinage, and the wider literature and culture of the period, providing each state with what James Craig had called in 1922 ‘outward and visible signs’.

As this year’s commemorations have shown, these symbols and these traditions have had an enduring importance and relevance to Irish culture and society. With 2021 marking a century since it was introduced, the past few months have placed a renewed focus on partition and, in particular, on the difficulties that its remembrance and forgetting has entailed. Understood sometimes as a long overdue assertion of self-determination, as a tragic and yet unavoidable event, or as an epoch which continues to shape and condition the politics and culture of Ireland to this day, the inability to reconcile these interpretations has been a recurrent feature in these centenary events. What my research and my practical work at IMMA will seek to do is highlight how partition is reflected after 1920, how different traditions of culture and its interpretation came to be formed in both states, and how the late revolutionary period in Ireland has been selectively remembered by each state in recent years.

The central aim of the research aspect of the fellowship is to publish Irish Culture and Partition, 1920-1955 with Liverpool University Press, which will be the first major study of how the division of Ireland impacted the traditions of Irish literature and culture. I’ve previously published articles about partition, culture, and memory for RTÉ’s Brainstorm platform, as well as for Irish Central and the Irish Times, as well as a number of book chapters and journal articles on the literature and culture of partition, as well as newspaper history, capitalism and Belfast, and mid-century Irish women’s poetry.

From 2019 to 2020 I was the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and I’ve also held visiting fellowships from the University of Sao Paulo, NUI Galway, and Queen’s University Belfast. In 2018, I finished my PhD in the School of English at Trinity, where I studied rural and urban representations in the Irish novel from 1922-1955.

Further reading

Irish Times: ‘Burying the truth of Partition in the interest of peace? Remembering in the dark’

RTÉ Brainstorm: ‘The twists and turns from the Irish Free State to Ireland’

Irish Central: ‘The culture and the centenary of the Irish partition’

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IMMA Talks Online: A Reflection on Dr Sara Ahmed’s lecture, ‘Complaint, Diversity and Other Hostile Environments’

Sara Ahmed

Screen Studies Scholar Dr Zélie Asava looks back at this seminal talk on diversity work in educational and cultural institutions, exploring Sara Ahmed’s latest book on the lived experiences of minority groups where, despite a range of diversity and inclusion policies, she finds those who complain about discrimination still being cast as strangers or suspects, ‘persons to be interrogated’, and in response posits feminist projects of resistance.

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‘Complaint: a word can bring up a history. The word complaint derives from old French, complaindre, to lament, a lament, an expression of sorrow and grief, from Latin, lamentum, “wailing, moaning; weeping.’[1]

When reading her essays on feministkilljoys.com, I am always struck by the way Dr Sara Ahmed explores a word, an experience, a movement as indicative of wider social structures. Her lecture for IMMA’s Talks Online series explored histories of discrimination, drawing on the testimonies of those who have brought forward complaints about the institutional barriers they faced in universities whether as women, people of colour, disabled, LGBTQIA or all of the above, and the losses caused by this exclusion (as well as the imperial legacies which that exclusion protects). Ahmed’s talk took us on a journey from the local to the global, from the momentary to the systematic, which revealed the traces, as Edward Said puts it, of the imperial project in the everyday.[2]

'Complaint, Diversity and Other Hostile Environments' by Sara Ahmed
‘Complaint, Diversity and Other Hostile Environments’ by Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed’s work philosophically interrogates gender studies, critical race theory, queer theory, power and postcolonialism. A prolific writer, her books include: 2019’s What′s the Use?: On the Uses of Use, where she considers utilitarianism and the potentiality of queer use; 2017’s Living a Feminist Life where she builds on feminist of colour scholarship to show how feminist theory is generated from everyday life; and 2014’s Willful Subjects where she interrogates relations between the will and wilfulness. Her live-streamed lecture was based on her soon to be published book Complaint!, taking us through the mechanics, technologies, compulsions and costs of complaint. Grounded in critiques of institutionalised diversity by feminists of colour, this book is a collection of stories gathered over a two year period with the participation of academics and students from across the world. As an Irish academic of colour whose work explores the intersections between race, gender, sexuality and representation in screen narratives, I was delighted to introduce her talk and chair the Q&A. Ahmed’s work resonates with mine in its interdisciplinary, intersectional approach as well as our common interest in ‘not only how others are viewed but the power relations at stake in the production of that view.’[3]

In the last year, complaint has featured heavily in our national narratives following the widening of the poverty gap driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Irish Black Lives Matter Movement, as well as the critically awaited Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. Yet, as I reminded the online audience, testimonies of racial harassment and violence were made public as early as the 1940s and dismissed,[4] while reports regarding systemic institutional abuse were submitted and filed away. Complaint was positioned as antagonism, ingratitude or self-promotion and embedded prejudices were obfuscated, entrenching the divisions which persist today.

Queer use. Sara Ahmed
Queer use. Sara Ahmed

Critically reflecting on the role of ‘complaint’ within inclusion and diversity policies related to educational and cultural institutions, Ahmed showed how these spaces remain hostile environments despite or even through official policies on diversity and inclusion. In response, I asked Ahmed about what she refers to as ‘container technology’; where power is maintained through the restriction of the circulation of knowledge about those deemed Other, so that knowledge becomes a system of references in which the others are the objects, not subjects, spoken about, not spoken to. Ahmed presented ‘complaint collectives’ as a means of subverting asymmetric power relations and supporting complainants, observing that ‘it takes the work of a collective to spill complaints from their containers’.

Dr Philomena Mullen responded to Ahmed’s work in light of her own experiences of racism and speaking out, referring to institutionalisation and racialisation through personal testimony as a black mixed-race survivor of the Irish industrial school system. Ahmed noted how complaint teaches us about ‘what organisations enable; who they enable’ and the conditions of social membership. I was reminded of what Caelainn Hogan[5] calls the industrial-shame complex, whereby victims of institutional abuse were stigmatised and silenced, while institutionalisation was used as a mechanism for protecting narrow definitions of Irishness. Mullen’s comments on negotiating a racialised identity in an environment which is hostile to difference resonated with Ahmed’s positioning of complaint as diversity work, where the complainant’s otherness becomes the site of complaint, the cause of complaint, the performance of complaint. I thought of how complaint has become weaponised through the political valence of victimhood, as symbols of hegemony adopt what Lilie Chouliaraki[6] calls the ‘master’ signifier of victimhood, subverting discourses of power and violence through the neoliberal lens.

Dr Arpita Chakraborty explored issues of harassment, activism and intersectionality in her response, critiquing the lack of national frameworks to protect, support and empower victims of sexual harassment in both Ireland and India. Chakraborty discussed feminist recourses to sexual violence through reference to #LoSha, #MeToo and other feminist interventions. Ahmed examined why complaint is characterised as destructive rather than transformative or informative. She unravelled the pathologising of the complainant who, read as an institutional threat, is cast as disloyal, unpatriotic and ideologically removed, and who is subsequently physically removed. Coming back to complaint as pedagogy, Ahmed explored the architecture of the institution, with doors as symbolic of the barriers that stop some from progressing yet are imperceptible to others, that appear open but are ‘shut when you try to enter’. Referencing Audre Lorde’s observation that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’,[7] Ahmed critiqued the ‘diversity door’ as part of the ‘institutional mechanics of the non-performative’; investigations of structural inequalities whose recommendations go unimplemented and become yet another trace of a complaint. I thought of Sartre, who coined the term ‘neocolonial’ to argue that the colonial system could not be reformed by a structure which was itself colonial.

'Complaint, Diversity and Other Hostile Environments' by Sara Ahmed
‘Complaint, Diversity and Other Hostile Environments’ by Sara Ahmed

In the third and final response, Dr John Wilkins explored how universities can work to decolonise their programmes and expand their employment practices in ways that support and respect academics and students of colour rather than continuing to reinforce hegemonic discourse through what Ahmed calls ‘coercive diversity’. Time and again, Ahmed drew our attention to the methodology of the institution which seeks to present discrimination as a private problem, a problem which ought not to exist and therefore is deemed not to exist. This is what she calls the ‘institutionalisation of diversity’ where ‘techniques to redress racism… can be used as techniques for concealing racism’.[8] Lorde’s words left their trace across Ahmed’s notes on ‘queer use’ and the evolving functionality of space, as she called for a new structure of reform, a new institutional architecture and a new technology of hearing. Furthermore, Ahmed explained, only through transformative ‘dismantling projects’ might cultural institutions begin to accommodate those they were not built to accommodate. And while our complaints may end up in the complaints graveyard, these shadows from behind the veil[9] can also return to haunt an institution: ‘complaints can participate in the weakening of structures without that impact being tangible.’

Throughout her talk, Sara Ahmed spoke to our need to transform understandings of complaint and the complainant and to resist ideologies, policies and practices designed to silence and stigmatise. She listened with care to stories of complaint and acknowledged the hard road ahead. But she also provided hope through models for how we might find ways to push through systems resistant to complaint in order to achieve lasting structural change, and to become agents of that change given that, as Ahmed notes, not only is the personal political the structural is also personal.

[1] Feministkilljoys, Diversity Work as Complaint, 2017.

[2] Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge, 1978.

[3]  Feministkilljoys, Diversity Work as Complaint, 2017.

[4] Brannigan, John. Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

[5] Hogan, Caelainn. Republic of Shame: How Ireland Punished ‘fallen Women’ and Their Children. London: Penguin Books, 2020.

[6] Chouliaraki Lilie. “Victimhood: The Affective Politics of Vulnerability”. European Journal of Cultural Studies. Vol. 24 (1), 2021, pp. 10-27.

[7] Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. 7th Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007, pp. 110-114.

[8] Feministkilljoys, Diversity Work as Complaint, 2017.

[9] DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: New American Library, 1969.

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IMMA International Summer School, ART AND POLITICS #3 containment

Studio 9, IMMA Summer School 2019, Photo: Louis Haugh

This year’s IMMA International Summer School takes place online between 21 June and 9 July 2021. Focusing on the theme of containment, this free programme of seminars, discussions and workshops will feature a range of national and international artists, theorists and educators. Over the three-week programme, we will explore how mapping, border regimes, architecture and the politics of incarceration inflect contemporary culture and how art and artists explore, question and engage with this subject.

The Summer School is a multi-annual initiative, exploring the relationship between art and politics. Each year, a key theme is selected; this year’s theme, ‘containment’, has been chosen for its resonance with so many aspects of contemporary experience. Containment is a fundamental feature of the human condition; our earliest experience is of being held and contained by another. Containment can make us feel safe but it can also be experienced in terms of confinement and separation. Containment can be applied to how we conceptualise space, material and data, how we ‘map’ our surroundings or claim territory, and how we think through lines, categories and borders. Containment can be a political strategy (such as US foreign policy during the cold war) or a strategy for social control; in fact, the logic of containment continues to animate current border regimes and technologies worldwide. Strategies of containment also underpin the politics of incarceration and detention. In Ireland this was a feature of the Mother and Baby homes and the Magdalene Laundries established to contain women and children and, more recently, it has defined and shaped the structures of Direct Provision devised to contain people seeking asylum. Containment has also  been a core principle of recent worldwide public health measures in response to the pandemic.

Old Convent Direct Provision Centre, Ballyhaunis, Co. Mayo.. Vukašin Nedeljković
Old Convent Direct Provision Centre, Ballyhaunis, Co. Mayo.. Vukašin Nedeljković

Some of the ideas that will be explored during the Summer School include the uses of mapping as a strategy of both appropriation and resistance; the role of borders and border technologies; carceral capitalism; containment and public health; architectures of containment; containment as a psychic state; cognitive mapping and figure-ground apprehension.

Having identified this year’s thematic, we have structured the programme around a set of related key research questions. Two fundamental questions underpin this year’s summer school: What role does containment play in the way we conceive of and organise the world around us? and How can art and artists reflect on and critique these cultural, social, and cognitive strategies of containment?

To explore these questions, we have invited a range of contributors – artists, writers and educators –including Beatriz Colomina, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Romuald Hazoumè, Jackie Wang, Emma Wolf-Haugh, Nils Norman, Rajinder Singh and Alice Feldman, RESOLVE, Sarah Kariko, John Wilkins, Kimberley Campanello, Vukašin Nedeljković and Róisín Power Hackett.

RGKS Cribs: Christopher Mahon, 2019 (video still). Videography Cian Brennan. Image courtesy RGKSKSRG and the Artist.
RGKS Cribs: Christopher Mahon, 2019 (video still). Videography Cian Brennan. Image courtesy RGKSKSRG and the Artist.

The Summer School programme develops every year as we learn from the experience of our contributors and participants; as a result, each School is not a discrete unit but an iteration of an ongoing research exercise.

Jackie Wang
Jackie Wang

Learning on the Summer School takes place through lectures, discussions and workshops and the sharing of information, ideas and resources. Our thinking has been influenced by the kinds of alternative educational principles and philosophies that have become a key focus for contemporary art. With the Summer School programme, we aim to create level learning relationships. Everyone brings specific knowledges and skills to a programme like this.  It is our view that the most successful, transformative educational experiences unlock these knowledges and skills by creating possibilities for collaboration, co-learning and solidarity. The Summer School is interdisciplinary, participatory and its structure is both vertical and horizontal: vertical in that it provides an opportunity to drill down into or build up a subject or theme; and horizontal in that participants learn from the presenters and from each other and we learn from them. In this way, the summer school continues to be shaped, year to year, by the participants’ knowledge and experience.

Emma Wolf-Haugh, xxxx
Emma Wolf-Haugh, xxxx

Most of the Summer School happens online, enabling participants from all over the world to take part. While students and scholars and researchers are actively encouraged to take part, anyone with an interest in the subject matter and who is willing to undertake the work involved is welcome to participate. This year we have more than 70 participants from 22 countries.

The Summer School also provides an opportunity for the participants, many of whom may never get to visit Ireland, to get to know IMMA and its programmes, even if only virtually, creating a community of interest which continues to engage with IMMA beyond the life of the summer school. Participants are introduced to IMMA’s history and programmes as well as its beautiful buildings and grounds. Several of IMMA’s programming team will introduce participants to aspects of IMMA’s past, current and future exhibitions and its environs and grounds. This year Rachael Gilbourne, Assistant Curator: Exhibitions – Projects & Partnerships, will discuss the potential of site in terms of her practice, both at IMMA and with RGKSKSRG, exploring how context can act as a container and a maker of meaning. Seán Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions, will introduce the first chapter of the forthcoming museum-wide exhibition of work from IMMA’s Collections the Narrow Gate of the Here and Now and Janice Hough, IMMA Residency and Artist Programmer, will talk about IMMA’s Artist Residency Programme.

In devising the structure for the summer school, we have thought a lot about the role of research in a contemporary art museum and the possibilities for engaged public pedagogy that spans and explores disciplines, drawing on expertise and knowledge from many different sources. Contemporary art is, by its nature, a space for thinking across and against disciplinary boundaries. As a contemporary art museum, IMMA is in a position to be a home or, at very least, a way station for different approaches to knowledge, research and pedagogy. In this way, the Summer School is a space for thinking together beyond the confines of borders or physical boundaries. We are very excited to welcome the school of 2021 to join us in manifestation of IMMA in the shared virtual space of Zoom in June!

Many of the Summer School talks are open to the public and details of the programme and how to book will be available on our website, click here for details.

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IMMA 30: Celebrating 30 years of Studio 10

Studio 10 participants in IMMA’s Formal Garden. Temporary installation in response to Doris Salcedo’s exhibition, 2019

As part of IMMA’s 30th Birthday celebrations Helen O’Donoghue, IMMA’s Head of Engagement & Learning, shares with us the story of Studio 10, IMMA’s longest running Engagement & Learning Programme which started in 1991. Studio 10 has had many iterations over it’s 30 year history with many partnerships and collaborations and has become a valuable part of the Museums story. Every week, from September to June, this eclectic group of individuals gather at 10am in Studio 10 to share in their passion for art and  art making. 

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“The Irish Museum of Modern Art was practicing lifelong learning years before politicians and commentators discovered it. Five years ago a group of older people from Inchicore, who had come to the Museum ‘to learn to draw’, produced one of the most moving exhibitions I have ever seen in an art gallery, the magical ‘Ribbons of Life’ show”

Andy Pollak, (former Education correspondent The Irish Times) A Space to Grow, 1999

Studio 10 grew out of a long-term outreach programme with the St Michael’s Parish Active Retirement Association, in Inchicore, Dublin 8, that was initiated in 1991 and was developed into an open studio model for adults more generally in the mid-2000s. This year IMMA celebrates its 30th birthday, as does this evolving programme.

Artist Christine Mackey leading a ‘Charcoal & Chocolate’ workshop in response to Vik Munoz’s exhibition, 2007
Artist Christine Mackey leading a ‘Charcoal & Chocolate’ workshop in response to Vik Munoz’s exhibition, 2007

In early 1991, before the museum opened to the public a close working relationship had been established with this group of older residents in the nearby area of Inchicore. This was in keeping with the museum’s policy of involving the local community in the life and work of the museum. It also recognised the potential and role of older people in contemporary visual culture. The painting group of the Retirement Association exhibited work as part of the Museum’s inaugural exhibition Inheritance and Transformation.  A partnership was then established with the national agency Age and Opportunity which provided support and advice for the work with older adults.

The first decade saw a vibrant programme whereby the group worked with several artists who facilitated art making in the studios, linked with other groups in the south inner city and acted as key workers in IMMA’s National Programme. They also piloted a Curatorial project ‘Come to the Edge…’ and participated in a four-year action research project in a European funded Socrates programme exploring peer to peer learning in museums.

St. Michael’s Parish Active Retirement Association Art Group with artist/photographer Tony Murray, Inheritance and Transformation, 1991
St. Michael’s Parish Active Retirement Association Art Group with artist/photographer Tony Murray, Inheritance and Transformation, 1991

The programme has developed incrementally over the past three decades into the current Art & Ageing programme which caters for Adults including those living with Dementia and Alzheimer’s through online and onsite programmes and continues to form a key part of IMMA’s Engagement & Learning programmes. IMMA was an inaugural founder of the national Bealtaine festival which is programmed by Age & Opportunity and has worked nationally and internationally with them and other key stakeholders including the Alzheimer’s Society of Ireland and the Butler Gallery to develop the Azure programme and more recently the Mercer’s Institute for Successful Ageing (MISA) at St James’ Hospital/Trinity College. This year Creative Ireland supported a pilot online programme to support people who have had to cocoon throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

The objectives of this programme are to ensure that the museum is catering for as wide an audience as possible and to encourage involvement in the museum by identifying and responding to peoples’ needs; to breakdown existing barriers to the involvement of older people in contemporary visual arts, by involving them in as many ways as possible including the influencing of museum policy.

Jean Brady and John Kenny, working on ‘Memory Maps’ led by artist Ailbhe Murphy and Ann Davoran, 1995
Jean Brady and John Kenny, working on ‘Memory Maps’ led by artist Ailbhe Murphy and Ann Davoran, 1995

The initial programme was evaluated in 1999 by Dr Ted Fleming and Anne Gallagher of Maynooth University as part of an EU Socrates funded programme and marked the United Nations International Year of Older people that year.

“Issues which are at the core of adult education are seen here in practice in IMMA. Adult education is about forging connections and seeing more than two polarities: it is about moving away from dualistic thinking to more connected and holistic modes of learning and action. The programme is a powerful introduction to new ways of thinking, perceiving, acting and interacting. It has important implications for arts in the community”

From the publication Even her nudes were lovely: Towards connected self-reliance at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1999

The current Studio 10 programme evolved out of a series of open studio programme initiatives in the mid-2000s. A series of drawing workshops titled from Charcoal to Chocolate inspired by Vik Munoz’s exhibition in 2004, marked that years’ Bealtaine festival and broadened our participation beyond the inaugural group.

Visitor Engagement Team and the current programme

Studio 10 participants with Ciara Murray, Visitor Engagement Team
Studio 10 participants with Ciara Murray, Visitor Engagement Team

The IMMA gallery staff, the Visitor Engagement Team (VET), provide a range of experiences for the public, engaging visitors through informal discussion about the artwork on view, designing formal tours for school and other groups, and on a range of programmes for children’s’, community and adult groups. The programme has continued and grown to include adults of all ages from a broad social and geographic demographic who come together every Friday morning from September to June, at IMMA.

Every week this community of learners gathers at 10am in Studio 10 at IMMA and work together to engage with ideas and art making techniques.

The sessions are led by the VET who share knowledge and skills across a wide variety of art practices that are centered on work that they explore in exhibitions in IMMA’s temporary exhibition programmes. Through this programme which is run in a series of three consecutive sessions over as many weeks, participants can deeply immerse themselves in exploring themes and learn about the ideas behind the specific artworks or artists that they focus on and subsequently draw from this and their own life experience to make artwork themselves in the studios.

Artist Christine Mackey leading a ‘Charcoal & Chocolate’ workshop in response to Vik Munoz’s exhibition, 2007
Artist Christine Mackey leading a ‘Charcoal & Chocolate’ workshop in response to Vik Munoz’s exhibition, 2007

The group is now made up of a diverse range of adults who have joined the group over the past eighteen years. The community that gathers at IMMA on Fridays is an eclectic group of individuals, who all share a passion for art and art making and have their individual reasons for being involved. Benefits that have been described to us by participants attending the programme include – having fun and enjoyment… a sense of connectedness… a community of like-minded people who share similar interests… providing the opportunity to engage with challenging work in the galleries… the continually learning new skills… the opportunity to meet and to work with people of different ages…  to work with and meet artists.

The VET rotate their facilitation and run the programmes in a series of three weekly sessions to focus on a particular artwork, or exhibition. The team are made up of talented artists and educators all of whom share the Museum’s belief in creating access to art for everyone irrespective of prior knowledge or experience. The invitation is open to anyone who is interested in exploring art and meeting others who share the same interest.

We have just launched Tracing Memories a series of six themed, documentary-style podcasts, this is a valuable audio archive collated over the past two years and captures a moment in time through first person accounts of their engagement with IMMA and its impact on the participants. The first episode Colours of Childhood is available to listen to here.

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Studio 10 is currently taking place online three Fridays per month. For additional information on Studio 10 or any of our Art & Ageing programmes please contact Catherine Abbott at [email protected]

 

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The Last Ferry, for Ruth Libbey O’Halloran

Mum on her deck. SLR photograph by Beth O'Halloran (2004)

This essay, The Last Ferry, was conceived for The Maternal Gaze series and hinges on the ways Beth O’Halloran’s mother’s ethics and love of nature shaped her practice. The personal essay and accompanying images focus on a road trip O’Halloran shared with her mother, Ruth Libbey O’Halloran. They travelled from Ruth’s native Maine to the island of Nova Scotia. It is a meditation on maternal love, loss and the transference of enduring codes for living. 
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I’m awake before you. Is that a first? I creep out of the motel room as quietly as I can, to feel the air and look through a lens – to gain a little distance. The lake is hidden in a thick, blue-purple fog. I can’t tell where the air stops and the water begins.

It is cool and damp – Canadian cold meeting the last warmth of a New England summer. I am standing on a small wooden dock, wrapped in mist, wishing I had brought the cardigan you gave me. There is a tree to my right – the only solid thing – but even that is slipping from view. The camera makes a click so loud, ducks swim away.

Missed. SLR photograph by Beth O'Halloran (2005)
Missed. SLR photograph by Beth O’Halloran (2005)

These trees, the birdsong I can match to its sources, the sound of lake water lapping the shore. All these things you led your six children to from the start. You were a girl-scout and can mimic a chickadee’s call so well, he answers you. ‘You never need to get lost in the forest,’ you said. ‘Just look for the lichen on the north side of the tree trunks.’ You catch my arm before I step on a lady’s slipper, then explain why the flower is so rare. You bend to show me the lily of the valley hidden in shadows and your kitchen sink is always, always full of potting soil and clippings. There is an open book on your lap, even as you drive. These things I thought every child knew, until I wasn’t a child anymore.

I know you are tired. We both know that today’s trip is the last you will take and that the sickness in you is what is keeping you dreaming, as milky light bleeds through the screened windows.

I can see your lamp flick on inside as a lone streetlamp glows orange above a blue-grey garden.

Motel. SLR photograph by Beth O'Halloran (2005)
Motel. SLR photograph by Beth O’Halloran (2005)

By the time I get back in, you are busy packing. The kettle hisses and clicks as you make coffee and open a little milk jigger with a squirt. You hand the coffee to me with a bundle wrapped in a napkin. ‘Found you a muffin.’

Back in the car, we drive towards the ferry port. Today we leave Acadia at Maine’s northern tip to travel to Nova Scotia, so you can visit the first place you and your husband went to be alone together – after having three children in as many years. You are quiet on the drive, except for the high-pitched sound you make when the car dips into pothole after pothole. Your hand clutches your abdomen.

After the diagnosis, you said, ‘No more chemo. No more surgeries. I’m tired of being a pin-cushion.’ Instead, you wanted this trip. I dreaded the idea of being in a car and then the cabin of a boat with you – seeing your pain close up. At every chance, I slip away. On the deck, I take shots of the rising sun – the whole sky pinks and greens above the wide sea. Back in the cabin, you ask to take some. Holding the camera with unsteady hands, you point it through the porthole. ‘That sky sure is showing off,’ you say.

I am not taking any photos of you. It doesn’t feel right, knowing that soon you won’t be able to see the printed images. Instead, I photograph the things you always pointed my chin towards – the skies, the trees.

On Golden Lake. SLR photograph by Beth O'Halloran (2019)
On Golden Lake. SLR photograph by Beth O’Halloran (2019)

We go for a meal where you and Dad had gone with a seat right on the bay. You eat a lobster dinner, your chin covered in butter, you lick each finger, grinning.

A few days after we get back to Portland, you get a call from your good friend, the Monsignor. He had been up to Lewiston overseeing a funeral and had wandered around Mount Hope Cemetery. He stopped in his tracks when he came across a headstone with your name engraved on it, already placed on a plot. There was your birthday followed by a dash and a blank space. ‘Eager beavers, aren’t they,’ you said with a chuckle.

And of course, you had to see it. Which is how I am once again the designated driver for this macabre road trip.

We avoid the turnpike and take the scenic route 202 which leads us down Main Street. Passing a cluster of discount stores, you say, ‘Let’s just pop our heads in to Marden’s in case there are any bargains.’ Then back down Main, past the red brick colonial in which you were born and raised. ‘There’s 612. I can’t for the life of me fathom why they pulled up all the lilacs. The place looks as bare as a penitentiary.’

Bridge with Mill. SLR photograph by Beth O'Halloran (2006)
Bridge with Mill. SLR photograph by Beth O’Halloran (2006)

We drive to the bridge, passing the W.S.Libbey Mill where your father made his name. We both look at the red brick mill, hanging over foamy waters. There used to be a rock on each side of the falls – one looked like an Indian profile and the other was the image of George Washington.

I ask you, ‘What tribe was it that lived in this neck of the woods again?’

‘Heavens child, how do you not know that? And you, the daughter of an historian. The Abenaki. But they didn’t last long. Got wiped out by smallpox, courtesy of the colonists. Never stood a chance.’ You look to the other side of the bridge at a huge purple building, ‘My word, look at the godawful colour they’ve gone and painted the bank this time.’

The two rock faces are long gone – worn away by the rapids and the blasting for industry. We drive on and through the gates with Mount Hope Cemetery engraved on slabs of granite either side. When we get to the familiar curve, you break the silence with, ‘You wait in the car, honey. You might get upset.’ I nod and swallow. I watch you walk in your sensible shoes through thin snow. When you get to your plot, you use your foot to clear snow and leaves from your young husband and your eldest daughter’s headstones, before doing the same to your own. Then you turn with a satisfied nod and sit back down beside me. You’re smiling when you say, ‘Let’s go to Sam’s. You look like you could do with a sandwich.’

Mum on her deck. SLR photograph by Beth O'Halloran (2004)
Mum on her deck. SLR photograph by Beth O’Halloran (2004)

View this essay here as part of The Maternal Gaze Series.

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The Green Journal: Spring

Hoverflies on dandelion.

In this second Green Journal entry, Sandra Murphy from our Visitor and Engagement team, will keep you updated on some of the seasonal changes on the grounds at IMMA. Topics include some tips on how to create a Wildflower Garden to help encourage Biodiversity in your garden.

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Looking back to February & March…

Daffodills on Terrace at IMMA
Daffodils on Terrace at IMMA.

Daffodils were in full blossom and could be seen on the Terrace and in the Formal Gardens at IMMA.

Purple Crocus
Purple Crocus

Purple flowering crocus scattered among the spring flowers which included cyclamen and anemone beneath the trees on the Terrace and by the fountains in the Formal Gardens.

Early Pollinators in Spring.

Buff-tailed bumblebee queen feeding on the yellow mahonia
Buff-tailed bumblebee queen feeding on the yellow mahonia.

Buff-tailed bumblebee queen is one of the earlier species to emerge in early spring. Feeding on the yellow mahonia in the Formal Gardens. Mahonia is a non-native plant but is a great nectar-rich shrub for early pollinators.

Common carder bee feeding on violets beneath the apple trees at IMMA.
Common carder bee feeding on violets beneath the apple trees at IMMA.

White-tailed bumblebee queen can be up to 20mm in length. Early emerging bees rely on dandelions. Don’t mow let it grow!

World Bee Day takes place on 20th May 2021.  Research shows that our Irish bee populations are still in decline, so remember to plant some pollinator friendly plants.

1. New planting on the perimeters of the meadows.<br>2. Spring flowering on crab apple tree.
1. New planting on the perimeters of the meadows.
2. Spring flowering on crab apple tree.

Common hawthorn, also known as thorny hedge. This tree is native to Ireland and supports over 200 insects and is also pollinated by insects. Recently planted by OPW garden team at IMMA.

Now is a good time to consider planting native trees such as willow, silver birch, rowan and hazel.

 

1. Bark of walnut tree in the Formal Gardens.<br>2. OPW Tree Tags
1. Bark of walnut tree in the Formal Gardens.
2. OPW Tree Tags

Tree tags – a recent arrival at IMMA. Keeping a record of and caring for the Collection in The Green Cube.

Bark of the mature holly tree. Female trees produce the red berry.

Male catkins on the poplar trees.
Male catkins on the poplar trees.

Black or white poplar are one of the first trees to release pollen in Spring. These trees can be seen on the perimeters of the meadows in the grounds at IMMA .

Rosebuds can be found climbing the sunny south wall in the Formal Gardens.

Rosebud February 2021.
Rosebud February 2021.

‘On an old apple tree in the physician’s garden of the Old Man’s Hospital, Kilmainham.’

The Flora of the County Dublin (1904) by Nathaniel Colgan.

Mistletoe has returned again to the gardens with a little help from Mary Condon OPW. Mistletoe is a strange species. Its scientific name is Viscum album; usually bird-distributed, the seeds are covered in a sticky, viscous gel that attaches itself to the bark of a tree.

Mistletoe.
Mistletoe.

A ‘hemiparasite’ or partial parasite, it usually grows on branches of species such as apple, lime, poplar, willow and hawthorn. It is an evergreen, forming large, spherical masses of vegetation which are attached to the host tree by a structure called a haustorium. This is a root which penetrates the outer tissue of the host tree and draws out nutrients and water, causing damage to the host tree by reducing its growth. Birds are responsible for spreading the seeds, either by passing them through their guts or by wiping their sticky beaks onto trees (courtesy of Zoë Devlin, author of Wildflowers of Ireland).

1. Mistle thrush feeding on Cotoneaster berries. <br>2. Mistle Thrush
1. Mistle thrush feeding on Cotoneaster berries.
2. Mistle Thrush

The mistle thrush acquired its common name by being one of those birds which favours a diet of mistletoe berries containing these seeds. Larger than the song thrush and also known as the storm cock, the mistle thrush is usually the first bird to sing after a storm or heavy rainfall.

Compared to the song thrush, the dark spots on the breast are rounded and not arrow-headed in shape. This bird utters a rattling alarm call. Can be spotted on the Terrace in the grounds at IMMA.

The Irish coal tit in yew tree.
The Irish coal tit in yew tree.

A busy little bird and very enjoyable to watch on the bird feeder, flying back and forward with nuts to eat them in a different location.

1. Blue tit checking out a suitable home in the walled garden at IMMA.<br>2. Long -Tailed Tit
1. Blue tit checking out a suitable home in the walled garden at IMMA.
2. Long – Tailed Tit.

Hard to spot but once seen, the Long-Tailed Tit is never forgotten. Very long tail and often seen flying in flocks but only a pair were seen on the day.

1. Tulips blooming in the Formal Gardens now at IMMA.<br> 2. Poppy seed head in the meadows at IMMA in 2020.
1. Tulips blooming in the Formal Gardens now at IMMA.
2. Poppy seed head in the meadows at IMMA in 2020.

 

To   Let

Cosy bijoux home in D8.

Amenities include: Museums, cafes, great views.

Suitable for small families.

Viewing from Spring to Summer.

Quiet neighbours except for the Jackdaw Family up the road!

Nest Box.
Nest Box located on the IMMA and RHK site.

Now is the time to get those nest boxes built or bought.

Birdwatch Ireland have some clear instructions on their website on building your own nest box. Please see links below.

Always buy native Irish wildflower seed. Avoid supermarket seeds.

Supermarket seeds contain non-native species of plants and when grown can become an invasive species. Most of those plants grown from seed do not support our native Irish birds, insects or butterflies. Even a small 6×6 Irish wildflower patch will attract wildlife to your garden and will help biodiversity in Ireland.

See further information on how to make an annual wildflower meadow here.

Useful links

BirdWatch Ireland.

How to identify and record common Irish Bumblebees, Biodiversity Ireland.

Wildflowers of Ireland.

Birds Ireland.

CJ Wildlife, Nest Boxes

Pollinator-friendly grass cutting

Many thanks to Mary Condon OPW and her team at IMMA.

Thank you also to Zoe Devlin for her amazing information on Mistletoe.

 

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Photographs Reassembled

Installation view, Jan McCullough Tricks of the Trade, 2020, Photographic print, plywood, trestles, torqued steel, boiled linseed oil, frame emulsion: paint cloth lilac, wall emulsion: docket pink. Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland (28th November 2020 – 1st May 2021).

Jan McCullough is the recipient of IMMA’s Photography Residency Award which commenced January 2020, offering an opportunity to undertake two formal residencies: one at IMMA and the other in partnership with the internationally renowned Light Work in Syracuse, New York. The award included a third peripatetic residency supporting self-initiated international research journeys as proposed by the artist. In early 2020 McCullough went to the USA to take a deeper dive in to the rituals and rhythms of the DIY processes we use to construct and imagine ourselves. Visiting workshops, businesses and meeting with self-improvement initiatives McCullough connected with sub-cultures of collective and creative thinking.

McCullough returned to IMMA’s Residency where these accumulative experiences shifted her work significantly. In her IMMA studio McCullough pushed her photography and research further in to 3D form. As the world came to a standstill in March 2020 a second journey to the USA was put on hold, along with a residency with Light Work scheduled for May 2020. Since then Light Work successfully re-instated international online residencies, with McCullough completing a remote one-month residency in February 2021. Jan McCullough will return to IMMA later this year to resume the final stage of this expanded residency award.

1. Jan McCullough Studio at IMMA, 2020. 2. Jan McCullough, Maquette, 2020, PS2, Belfast.
1. Jan McCullough Studio at IMMA, 2020.
2. Jan McCullough, Maquette, 2020, PS2, Belfast.

Below Sarah Allen interviews Jan McCullough about the role of photography in her work, what informs her methodology with the artform, how her practice has evolved with recent opportunities and events, and what’s next.

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Photography is often a starting point in your work, and I know the camera’s capacity as a research tool is central. Could you speak about how the role of photography has evolved in your practice?

Photography is the backbone of my work, though it’s not always the end point in my process. Recently it has played a more fluid role – as source material, becoming reconfigured into more sculptural and three-dimensional forms. I’m interested in the instructional quality of photography–it can represent how an object or space should ‘ideally’ look (e.g. in instruction manuals) or how it can prescribe a certain way of viewing, through chosen framing. I think there’s a really fascinating relationship between photography and sculpture… the physicality of it – the camera can visually dissect a space, reconfiguring forms within it. I often do this physically too, through photographic collage – in preparation for building into 3D forms.

And your use of scrapbooks is also key in that move between two- and three-dimensional form…

I’ve always used my own photographs in scrapbooks and sketchbooks in a tactile way as part of my process …photocopying, cutting up, gluing together or painting over – making new configurations within the images. Recently I realised I had built up an evolving archive of images from spaces of ‘construction’ that I kept returning to photograph, such as hardware shops, garages, sheds and factory floors. During lockdown I took the scrapbooks with these ‘reconfigured’ photographs and started to physically construct the flat images inside them for the first time.

Jan McCullough, Scrapbook for Tricks of the Trade, Biro blue, voltage red, 2020.
Jan McCullough, Scrapbook for Tricks of the Trade, Biro blue, voltage red, 2020.

What is it that interests you about these ‘spaces of construction’?

The role of photography within the DIY / self-improvement culture fascinates me – how we use it to construct and imagine ourselves. I have previously documented ‘spaces’ generated by DIY activities, where the photographic image acts as an interface between the private and public performances of desire, such as in Home Instruction Manual (2014-2016), where I made and documented a home ‘from scratch’, using advice from strangers on the internet. Photography encircles and shapes us whether we like it or not, through advertising, television, online…a better life has been commodified to be bought and built. But what does it look like to ‘build’ a life when desires are shaped by advertising and the photographic image?  And what do the spaces [in which these processes become physical] look like?

I also love how you have previously described the ‘rituals and rhythms’ that take place in these spaces and I’m interested in that sense of play that comes across in your installations. For example, Tricks of the Trade (2020) sees the functional object – a worktable or scaffolding – losing its function – becoming an absurd object and the installation on a whole wonderfully evokes a playground.

There is a childlike curiosity in entering into a space of construction which is not your own – like stepping into a temporary world or someone else’s den. When making Tricks of the Trade, (an installation of structures, sculptures and photographs exploring spaces of construction opened in November 2020 and runs until 1 May 2021 at The Centre for Contemporary Art CCA in Derry/Londonderry), I was thinking about the sensation in these spaces and how the materials and assemblages often seem to develop a language or life of their own. While I had brought materials to use and photographs as ‘notes’, the building of the structures themselves took part solely in the gallery in an ‘ad hoc’ way which responded to the space, like how the photographs were collaged and reconfigured in the scrapbooks at the start of my process. The structures in the gallery are three-dimensional translations of (sections of) my photographs… transformed / physically constructed into the space. There was a playfulness to the materials themselves that I wanted to let evolve during the installation in CCA.

1. Jan McCullough, Light Work Remote Residency, in partnership with IMMA, 2021.2. Jan McCullough, Light Work Remote Residency, in partnership with IMMA, 2021.
1. Jan McCullough, Light Work Remote Residency, in partnership with IMMA, 2021.
2. Jan McCullough, Light Work Remote Residency, in partnership with IMMA, 2021.

And that sense of play is also activated by how the viewer interacts with the installation, correct?

Yes – for me the installation is only half visual, it’s also the smell and experience of the materials themselves – the wood, metal, paint and oil. I’m fascinated with how photography can encounter and transform built space. I wanted to build sections of the installation to guide the viewer to different planes of view and ways of navigating it – like when I’m using a camera; where I position my body translates directly to the image frame. They might have duck under or climb through parts of the structures. To interact with materials in this way is quite childlike.

1. Installation view, Jan McCullough, Tricks of the Trade, 2020, Timber structure, photographic print, frame emulsion: biro blue, Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland (28th November 2020 – 1st May 2021).2. Installation view, Jan McCullough, Tricks of the Trade, 2020, Plywood plinth, torqued steel, Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland (28th November 2020 – 1st May 2021).
1. Installation view, Jan McCullough, Tricks of the Trade, 2020, Timber structure, photographic print, frame emulsion: biro blue, Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland (28th November 2020 – 1st May 2021).
2. Installation view, Jan McCullough, Tricks of the Trade, 2020, Plywood plinth, torqued steel, Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland (28th November 2020 – 1st May 2021).

In the past you have mentioned your interest in the camera’s capacity to ‘make strange’ –a concept that has such a rich history within avant-garde photography. I also find it interesting that you have spoken in the past of how the camera’s mechanical function is the very means through which it ‘makes strange’ through flash, zoom, framing and different angles – again something pioneered by avant-gardes like Moholy-Nagy who embraced the camera’s mechanical eye to see the world anew. It’s interesting to consider within the context of your work in which you create 3D sculpture inspired by the language of photographic process such as flash etc….

Definitely – the camera by its very nature makes our world strange. The photograph is always a slice of a larger picture, a subjective abstraction of reality. When photographing I often work with a powerful flash, which singles out details from the surrounding environment – dissecting and sometimes reducing individual features to outlines. I like using the photograph as a tool not simply for representing objects and spaces, but for reconfiguring their form and function as well – as a source of shapes and forms to be further transformed in later stages of work.

I love the research images of materials (and their transformation later as paintings) in Paul Nash’s work (eg. Still Life on Car Roof (1934) and Maurice Broomfield’s photographs of factory workers from the 50’s and 60’s. Also, the more functional/utilitarian use of photography (as you say, embracing the camera’s mechanical eye) – like in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s ‘Pennsylvania Coal Mine Tipples’ (1974 – 1978) and the manual ‘Instant Furniture’ (Peter S Stamberg / The Globus Brothers, 1976).

Jan McCullough, Scrapbook, 2018, Photographs from ‘Instant Furniture’ by Peter S Stamberg and the Globus Brothers, 1976.
Jan McCullough, Scrapbook, 2018, Photographs from ‘Instant Furniture’ by Peter S Stamberg and the Globus Brothers, 1976.

I love the reference to Broomfield as well as Nash. There was an excellent exhibition of Broomfield’s work I saw not so long ago in Derby – the factory floor, but not as we know it! The works is so theatrical and glamorous. What is it in particular that interests you about these images?

Broomfield’s images are highly staged and lit, and the working environments within them look lush and shiny; completely the opposite of how I would have imagined them. But of course, his photographs weren’t ‘documentary’, instead commissioned by industrial corporations for promotional use… hence the machinery and workers poised picture-perfect and polished for his camera. I read that he once repainted a whole section of a factory in preparation for an image! The photographic staging looks so surreal within those environments…

I love the idea of repainting a section of the factory to prep for a shoot – a time before photoshop! I’m also interested in the role text plays in your work, it featured in one of your first bodies of work Home Instruction Manual (2014-2016) and more recently you have commissioned the author Wendy Erskine to write about your work…

I often work with DIY manuals and procedures for organising as part of my process – where images are printed alongside written commands. When making Tricks of the Trade, I knew I would have to provide a brief text for the viewer but didn’t want to prescribe an experience of the work– I wanted the text to have a life of its own, like the materials themselves. For Wendy’s text which is titled ‘Instructions for the Assembly of Workspace’ I posted her a small package of materials from my studio such as photographs of ladders, worktables, collages and a list of things I had in the studio. It formed a strange kind of menu and Wendy then wrote the text using that ‘menu’ as a point of departure. Wendy drops the reader right into their own imagined space of construction– requiring them to utilise their own tactile memory and smell.

Wendy Erskine and Jan McCullough, Instructions for the Assembly of Workspace, 2020, Collaboration between writer Wendy Erskine and artist Jan McCullough. Designed by Sean Greer at Nongraphic Funded by Freelands Foundation, London.
Wendy Erskine and Jan McCullough, Instructions for the Assembly of Workspace, 2020, Collaboration between writer Wendy Erskine and artist Jan McCullough. Designed by Sean Greer at Nongraphic Funded by Freelands Foundation, London.

It’s a fantastic text, recently I find myself most drawn to photobook text commissions that are creatively independent like Wendy’s, a refreshing change from deadening the work through over-interpretation. Finally, can you tell me a little more about your current work with The Light Work Residency and your future engagements with IMMA?

The Light Work Residency (in partnership with IMMA) was originally meant to be a production residency in New York, it recently took place under lockdown conditions from home. I used the time to fully immerse myself in the tactile processes that are central to my practice as part of the experimentation process for new work involving photographic and sculptural processes. It’s been great to have remote studio visits and conversations about the evolving work with the Light Work community. I’m interested to see how this period alters my processes going forward, and after working scaled-down at home, I’m excited to see how the work evolves and physically expands when I return to the studio space at IMMA later this year, in 2021.

1. Jan McCullough, Work in Progress from Light Work Remote Residency, in partnership with IMMA, 2021.2. Jan McCullough, Studio at IMMA, January 2020.
1. Jan McCullough, Work in Progress from Light Work Remote Residency, in partnership with IMMA, 2021.
2. Jan McCullough, Studio at IMMA, January 2020.