‘Ghost Ship’, sculptor Dorothy Cross’s winning entry for the current Nissan Art Project for art in the public domain, will be realised in Scotsman’s Bay, Dun Laoghaire, in February 1999. The project, which involves the creation of a ‘ghost ship’ from a decommissioned lightship, was originally scheduled for October/November 1998. However, the unique and challenging nature of the project involving innovative technical processes as well as environmental issues, entailing negotiations with marine experts and authorities, has pushed the timing back to early 1999.

Ghost Ship is a personal homage by Dorothy Cross to the many lightships which once marked dangerous reefs around the Irish coast, but have now all but disappeared. The ship, generously loaned by the Irish Scouting Association, will be covered in luminous paint and at nightfall illuminated to glow and fade, evoking the poignancy of the disappeared lightships and the artist’s childhood memories, linked to her father’s love of the sea. Cross sees it as honouring “the memory of the lightships, whose presence was held dear around the Irish coast. The role of the sea has diminished for the Irish people and the view is inwards towards the cities.”

Commenting on the progress of the project Declan McGonagle, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which is curating the project, said: “This extraordinary project by one of Ireland’s best contemporary artists has thrown up considerable technical and environmental issues. I am glad to say we have been able to address these in preparation for Ghost Ship to appear early next year; particularly as the project, when announced, caught the imagination of commentators and public alike to an unusual degree.”

Gerard O’Toole, Executive Chairman, Nissan Ireland, said:”the Nissan Art Project has enabled us to become involved with some of the most creative visual arts concepts found in Ireland. Ghost Ship is exemplary of this culture and it has inspired unprecedented interest from both home and abroad. We look forward to its realisation next year.”

The Nissan Art Project, created and organised in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is intended to give artists working in any medium an opportunity to extend their practice to make a new temporary work for the public domain. This is defined as any space or process in the Dublin area to which the general public has ready unmediated access. The project was first realised in 1997 with ‘For Dublin’ by Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones, which presented neon texts from Molly Bloom’s ‘Ulysses’ monologue in nine related city cente locations.

Born in Cork in 1956, Dorothy Cross’s work has attracted considerable international attention in recent years. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, Madrid and throughout the United Kingdom and has works in a number of prestigious public and private collections. In 1993 she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale and was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex Artists Award in 1995 and 1997.

3 December 1998

The first exhibition in Ireland of the work of the distinguished Russian installation artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 20 November. The Children’s Hospital, which will see the Museum’s East Wing transformed into a children’s hospital ward, is the latest in a number of installations in leading international museums in which the artists have translated their experience of Soviet life into a sardonic, but often beguiling, metaphor for the human condition.

Using the existing gallery structure of eight rooms, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov will create individual wards, each with a hospital bed, chair and night table. In each room there will also be a mechanical model theatre telling an enchanting series of stories through words, music and the movement of puppets. In one room we hear the tale of Fifi the cat and the mice who live in a suitcase, in another the adventures of the Brazilian ballet-master Bigo and the famous ballerina Jolle who could execute 45 pirouettes “while never changing the happy expression on her face”. The stories, however, have no real ending and trail of enigmatically, reflecting the uncertain world in which they are set.

The artists see the absence of an occupant in each bed as creating space for the imagination of the visitor. “The visitor can sit in the chair next to each bed and watch the show. Perhaps these shows were created by the head doctor in the hospital in order to make the children’s time there a little bit nicer and easier, to distract them from their illness. Let the viewer believe that this really happened, let him believe in this ‘visual legend’. But even without this legend, the soft music, silence, tranquility, the simplicity of the architecture and the beautiful landscapes behind the windows of these rooms, all create an atmosphere which even for a ‘grown-up’ visitor will be good and ‘therapeutic’, will be just what he needs.”

Born in the USSR in 1933, Ilya Kabakov is one of the most compelling and influential artists to have emerged from the former Soviet Union. Since his arrival in the West in 1987 he has become a leading figure in installation art and art in public spaces. His practice combines drawings, paperworks, paintings and found objects in complex installations reflecting the social, historical and political forces which have shaped his life and work. These include his boyhood during Stalin’s regime, his obligatory career as a children’s book illustrator in the official Artists’ Union, his involvement in Moscow’s active underground avant-garde of artists and writers, and his more recent travels in the international art circuit. In all of his work Kabakov sees himself as essentially a “visual archaeologist” of people’s experience. He has built installations in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Kunsthalle, Bern; the Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Kunstalle, Cologne; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt; the Venice Biennale; and Documenta IX in Kassel.

Since 1990 Kabakov has worked closely with his wife, Emilia Kabakov. They live in New York City, but travel extensively following the itinerary of their installations.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov : The Children’s Hospital continues until 11 April 1999.

An exhibition of paintings and drawings by the British-born painter Hughie O’Donoghue opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 23 October. Hughie O’Donoghue: Corp spans 15 years of the artist’s practice, from 1984 to 1998, and is the first exhibition on this scale in Ireland since he moved to live in Kilkenny in 1996.

Hughie O’Donoghue: Corp, selected in close collaboration with the artist, comprises 25 works over 15 years portraying the human body, a key element in O’Donoghue’s work. The relationship between the languages of painting and drawing, which is also central to his practice, is also explored through the selection of the works. O’Donoghue has worked with large-scale drawings throughout his career and the exhibition includes a recent 7-metre-long charcoal and graphite drawing Crossing the Rapido.

Hughie O’Donoghue’s practice comes out of a deep understanding of the tradition of painting. Subject matter is developed through the painting process, with a figure often becoming a suggested presence in the finished work. He frequently works on a monumental scale, recalling the religious painting of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, though his work verges on abstraction. Since moving to Ireland, O’Donoghue has made a body of work in response to his family history which he has been researching through diaries, letters and photographs, with reference in particular to his father’s experiences in the Second World War. The exhibition will include several examples of these recent paintings and drawings.

Born in Manchester in 1953, Hughie O’Donoghue has been exhibiting his work in international solo and group exhibitions since 1982, and has gained a reputation as one of the leading painters of his generation. His paintings are included in important public collections including the National Gallery, London; the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; and the Arts Council of England. O’Donoghue was resident on the Artist’s Work Programme at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1996, when he worked on a particular series of paintings and also lead public masterclasses in drawing. He has spent the last 12 years working on a series of paintings entitled Via Crucis – a contemporary interpretation of the Passion. He exhibited a selection of these works at the Haus der Kunst, Munich in 1997. An exhibition of the series, which has been donated to the OPW, will be shown at the RHA Gallagher Gallery in January 1999, during the run of Corp at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

A fully-illustrated catalogue with an essay by the artist, will acompany the exhibition.

Hughie O’Donoghue: Corp is on show from Friday 23 October 1998 to 4 March 1999.

An exhibition bringing together some 20 works dealing with the Irish Famine of 1845-48 opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 24 September. Representations of the Famine is drawn from the relatively small body of visual depictions of the subject and highlights the often inaccurate nature of these representations, the reasons for this and ongoing sensitivities about dealing with the Famine in visual art.

Representations of the Famine includes a small number of paintings from the 19th and early 20th century and also pieces, in a variety of media, by contemporary artists who have taken the Famine as a key subject. These are shown alongside a body of new work by women from Voices from the Tower, a community arts development project based in Knocknaheeny, Cork. The exhibition was developed as part of the Museum’s National Programme and has already been shown in Belfast, Cobh, Castlebar and Derry.

Representations of the Famine explores the ways in which artists have dealt with the Famine in their work and the particular problems which that subject brought with it – the difficulty of recounting the full horror of the event while showing respect for its victims and the political sensitivity of representing Irish hardship in a colonial context. Daniel McDonald’s The Discovery of the Potato Blight is one of only a handful of responses by visual artists who lived through the disaster. McDonald overcame difficulties and resistances which prevented many other Irish artists from addressing the subject.

Henry Jones Thaddeus and Lady Elizabeth Butler are much better known as painters of picturesque Breton fishermen or calls to arms than for the spectacular but rare eviction pictures shown here, while Daniel McLise’s watercolour for the monumental painting The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife can be read as an overtly political commentary on Anglo-Irish relations in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Erskine Nicol’s paintings and the graphic illustrations from Punch magazine demonstrate the official disregard of the authorities and the unsympathetic climate in contexts to which many of the survivors fled.

Commenting on the exhibition Catherine Marshall, Senior Curator of the Museum’s Collection, said: “The historical works were exceptional in their time. For well over a century the horror of the event and the guilt of the survivors meant that the Famine was rarely represented visually. Only now is it possible to claim the dead as ours, to suffer with them as Geraldine O’Reilly does in Register and Emigrants Letter, to mourn for them as Alanna O’Kelly does in Sanctuary Wasteland and the women from Voices from the Tower in A Famine Cry. The somewhat strained relationship between art and the Famine is an indication of the importance of bringing a particular selection of works together, both in terms of remembering the Famine and its history, and understanding a change in the role of the visual artist.”

Representations of the Famine continues until 11 January.

A major exhibition of the work of William Scott (1913-1989), one of the most influential British artists of the 1950s and ‘60s, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 22 July. William Scott: Paintings and Drawings, is the most comprehensive showing of Scott’s work in Europe for many years and is the only showing of this exhibition, which includes some 90 works drawn from public and private collections as well as from those held by the Scott family. It shows aspects of the artist’s practice from the early figurative paintings of the 1930s through his abstract works to his return to a more realistic figuration in the late 1970s and ‘80s. It examines, in particular, the relationship between his paintings and drawings and includes many previously unseen works.

William Scott: Paintings and Drawings includes many of the works for which Scott is most widely known and through which he contributed to several movements and shifts in British and international painting. Orange and Red 1957 and Nile Valley: Red and White 1962 recall the floating shapes and gestural surfaces of the American Abstract Expressionists such at Rothko and de Kooning. These artists had an enormous influence on British painting of the 1950s and ‘60s and Scott played a central role in this relationship. The exhibition also demonstrates the extent to which Scott, nonetheless, remained a strong but self-effacing individualist, more especially in his extraordinary ability to straddle the divide between figuration and abstraction which dominated painting of the time. The exhibition presents his drawings as he himself thought of them – parallel to, and not preparations for, his paintings. It includes a number of works not previously exhibited, among them the Private Suite series of drawings, which have human sexuality as their subject.

These unseen works, expressing less familiar dimensions of Scott’s mind and art, provides a valuable opportunity for a re-reading of his complete oeuvre.

Declan McGonagle, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, sees this as “a key function of a public institution creating retrospective exhibitions – to unfix existing perceptions and present all possible options so that the work can be experienced afresh, in the present. In this case it was the artist who regularly unpicked form and meaning in his work and the exhibition takes its cue from his practice. As a result the ‘real’ William Scott may be seen to be broader, fuller and more creatively untidy than hitherto appreciated.”

William Scott was born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1913, to Scottish and Irish parents. He spent his youth in his father’s home town of Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, where he studied painting with Kathleen Bridle, before moving on to the Belfast College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools in London. He taught at Pont-Aven, Brittany, until the outbreak of World War II, during which he served in the Royal Engineers.

Afterwards he was appointed senior painting lecturer at the Bath Academy of Art where he attracted practising artists to join him, including Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost and Adrian Heath. He was a frequent visitor to St Ives and from 1954 he exhibited in New York, forging significant links with American Expressionists. He exhibited widely during his career, including the 1958 Venice Biennale, the Kunsthalle Zurich (1963) and the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York, (1975). He had a retrospective at the Tate in 1972 and in 1986 at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, touring to the Guinness Hopstore, Dublin, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He died in 1989 at Coleford near Bath.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication William Scott: Paintings and Drawings published by Merrell Holberton in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art. It includes texts by Mike Tooby, Curator, Tate Gallery St Ives, focussing on the content and context of his work beyond the terms of formalism, and by the critic and writer Simon Morley, who looks afresh at Scott’s work outside the framework of modernist theory. Colour illustrations of almost 100 works, biographical details, artists’s statements and contemporary reviews are also included. Price Stg £19.95.

Mike Tooby will give a lecture on Scott’s work on Wednesday 22 July at 11.30am at the Museum. The lecture is supported by the British Council. Admission is free.

The exhibition is supported by Oxford Exhibition Services.

William Scott: Paintings and Drawings continues until 1 November 1998.

The most extensive exhibition of works yet shown from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s own Collection opens to the public on Thursday 25 June. A Collection in the Making is an important milestone in the Museum’s development. It marks a significant and permanent increase in the space devoted to the Collection to almost half of the total gallery space, signalling the ever-increasing interest in this area of the Museum’s work and the extent of its development. The exhibition will be officially opened by Ms Síle de Valera, TD, Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, at 6.00pm on Wednesday 24 June. The first fully-illustrated reference catalogue of works owned by the Museum will be launched at the opening.

A Collection in the Making comprises individual works and groups of works by some 50 artists. Covering all aspects of the Collection as it has developed to date, it seeks not only to present a wide cross-section of the Museum’s works, but also to make the processes behind the growth and development of the Collection visible to a wider public. It includes a number of recent acquisitions, such as a characteristic graffiti work by Jean Michel Basquiat, created in collaboration with Lee Jaffe; One Way of Containing Air, a stunning experiment in new materials by Maud Cotter made from delicate strips of plaster and corrugated cardboard, and a 1997 painting by Paul Mosse using psychedelic colours, sawdust, nails and other materials to create a new abstract comment on the landscape. More familiar works are also being shown, from Turf Stacks in the Bog c 1920 by Paul Henry, widely regarded as the founding father of Irish landscape painting, to Smoke Rising 1989, an exploration of the psyche and life of modern man by British artists Gilbert and George.

The Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art comprises approximately 580 works by 20th-century and contemporary Irish and non-Irish artists. It has been developed by purchase and donations, as well as by the commissioning of new works. The Museum’s acquisition policy, like its temporary exhibition and access programmes, reflects the shifting cultural context of the late 20th century. The Museum purchases the work of living artists, but accepts loans and donations of more historical art objects with a particular emphasis on work from the 1940s onwards – a benchmark decade in the visual arts in Ireland.

Commenting on the exhibition the Museum’s Director Declan McGonagle, said: “The Collection has reached a stage of development where we can create displays and themed exhibitions on an ongoing basis which will allow the public to explore art of today in the context of art of the past. People will also have the chance to see the Collection grow and develop further as we acquire new works. These new displays will create greater access to the Collection and also assist the National Programme in its work of dispersing the assets, skills and resources of the Museum throughout the country.”

The fully-illustrated, reference catalogue will list all works in the Museum’s permanent Collection of modern art, and will carry an introductory essay by the Director, Declan McGonagle. The Madden-Arnholz Collection of Old Master Prints, which is unique in Ireland, will be listed but not illustrated.

The distinguished international curator Rudi Fuchs will also speak at the opening.

A Collection in the Making will continue to show in rotating displays in the First and Ground Floor West Wing Galleries.

The winner of the 1998 Glen Dimplex Artists Award is Belfast-born sculptor Siobhán Hapaska. The first recipient of the new award for a sustained contribution to the visual arts in Ireland is the distinguished Irish painter Louis le Brocquy. The awards, sponsored by the Irish-based company Glen Dimplex in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, were presented this evening (Thursday 11 June) by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, at a dinner at the Museum.

The £15,000 Glen Dimplex Artists Award is designed to mark a significant level of achievement or development in the work and practice of exhibiting artists. The 1998 award was open to Irish artists who had exhibited in Ireland or elsewhere from 1 October 1996 to 31 December 1997 and to non-Irish artists who had exhibited in Ireland in the same period. Siobhán Hapaska was nominated for solo exhibitions at the Entwistle Gallery, London; the Oriel Gallery, Cardiff, the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, and for her participation in the Plastik exhibition in Stuttgart and in Documenta X. The sustained contribution award is a non-monetary award being made for the first time this year. The recipient Louis le Brocquy is one of Ireland’s best-known artists, with a distinguished career stretching over 50 years. He was presented with a specially commissioned award, made by silversmith Cara Murphy.

Siobhán Hapaska has received considerable international attention in recent years with exhibitions in London, New York, Chicago and Stuttgart. Her sculptures defy easy categorisation, deliberately avoiding a recognisable signature, style or preferred material. They are characterised rather by an interplay of disparate forces – technology and nature, the mechanical and the human, the past and the future. Her perfectly finished works have a rootless, timeless quality. Hapaska has described her sculptures as “lost” – objects which don’t know where they have come from or where they are going. Their titles – To, Here, Stray – imply movement between places and times.
Born in Belfast in 1963, Hapaska studied in London at Middlesex Polytechnic and Goldsmiths’ College. She now lives and works in London.

The other artists shortlisted for the 1998 award were German installation artist Hans Peter Kuhn, American multi-media artists MacDermott and MacGough, Dublin-born sculptor Janet Mullarney and Belfast sound and installation artist Philip Napier. All of the shortlisted artists have been paid a fee of £1,000.

Louis le Brocquy was born in Dublin in 1916. A self-taught artist, he left the family business in 1938 to embark on a career as a painter studying on his own at the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, and in Venice and Geneva (then exhibiting the Prado’s collection). In 1947 he moved to London and began a long and successful association with the Gimpel Fils Gallery. He exhibited at Gimpel Fils that year, the first of some 50 international one-person exhibitions. In 1956 he won a major international prize at the Venice Biennale. Two years later he married the painter Anne Madden and has since lived and worked in Ireland and France. In 1996-97 he had a major retrospective exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Commenting on the awards Declan McGonagle, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Chair of the jury panel, said: “The panel members were agreed that nominations for the 1998 Glen Dimplex Artists Award were stronger than ever, and the exhibition of shortlisted artists was particularly powerful and popular as a result, but that Hapaska deserved the award for her uncompromising and innovative combination of materials and ideas in a post-modern period.”

Lochlann Quinn, Deputy Chairman of Glen Dimplex, said that as a company employing 6,000 people in Ireland, the UK, France, Germany and Canada, Glen Dimplex was especially pleased with the international dimension of the award and the obvious commitment to excellence and innovation on the part of all the artists involved. It was particularly fitting that the new award celebrated the achievements and contribution of Louis le Brocquy, one of Ireland’s best-loved artists.

The Glen Dimplex Artists Award was first made in 1994 when the winner was multi-media artist Alanna O’Kelly. Subsequent winners were video and photographic artist Willie Doherty (1995), American installation artist and sculptor Janine Antoni (1996) and photographic artist Paul Seawright (1997).

The jury panel for the 1998 awards is :
Declan McGonagle, Director, Irish Museum of Modern Art (Chair)
Thomas Sokolowski, Director, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, USA
Dominique Trucot, Director, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France
Paul M O’Reilly, Curator/Director, Limerick City Gallery of Art
Dr Margaret Downes, Chairman, BUPA Ireland; Director, Bank of Ireland
Dr Paula Murphy, Lecturer, History of Art Department, UCD; Board Member, Irish Museum of Modern Art
Brenda McParland, Senior Curator: Exhibitions, Irish Museum of Modern Art

The Glen Dimplex Artists Award exhibition continues on show until 5 July.

The first major exhibition of Outsider art to be seen in Ireland opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Saturday 13 June. Art Unsolved comprises more than 200 works by some 70 artists. Although from widely diverging backgrounds, all share a lack of formal art training, a powerful creative imagination and a fascination with the spiritual and mythological world. The exhibition is drawn from the Outsider Collection, established in London by the late Victor Musgrave and curated by Monika Kinley since 1984. The Collection is on loan to the Museum for a period of two years.

The exhibition is international in scope with works by artists from as far afield as Cyprus, the Czech Republic, the US and Australia. These include enormous drawings by the British artist Madge Gill, who worked compulsively at night, in darkness under the influence of a spiritual force which she called Myrninerest; exquisite sculptures made from pieces of wood collected from river mouths and beaches by the French artist Pascal Verbena, and a dinner and tea service decorated by the Glasgow-born Outsider Scottie Wilson whose works were collected by Picasso, Dubuffet and André Breton. The personal stories behind many of the works are equally compelling. That of Dusan Kusmic is not untypical. Born in the former Yugoslavia, he was brought to Dublin by the Red Cross in 1950. His traumatic experiences as a refugee in a displaced persons camp in Italy and his battles with language difficulties, poverty and social isolation, led him to create works using wallpaper, found objects and even food. For him, as for other Outsiders, the process of making art was a lifeline.

The search for and collection of Outsider art began almost 50 years ago with the French artist Jean Dubuffet, who characterised it as Art Brut (raw art). The precise definition of Outsider art has been the subject of much debate. Victor Musgrave described Outsider artists as “knowing little of cultural history or of the tradition of fine art. They draw their inspiration from within; the rules and taboos which trained artists cannot help being aware of have no meaning for them. They work spontaneously and often with great energy to produce images of remarkable power and freshness.”

The Outsider Collection was established in 1981 by the British writer, film-maker and gallery director Victor Musgrave, following the success of the Outsider Exhibitions, which he initiated and co-curated with Roger Cardinal at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1979. The Collection was to have formed the nucleus of a proposed public museum of Outsider art. At the time of his death in 1984, before his ambitions for the Archive had been fully realised, he expressed the wish that his companion Monika Kinley should continue the work of forming a representative collection to be made available to the public.

This international collection now consists of over 750 works. There is an extensive library and slide collection, and an ever growing volume of unique archival material, all of which will be located at the Irish Museum of Modern Art for the next two years. The Outsider Archive has now achieved charitable status as the Victor Musgrave Outsider Trust.

A book entitled Art Unsolved: The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Collection, with essays by Jon Thompson and Dawn Ades, will be published to coincide with the exhibition.

The Outsider Archive Exhibition continues until 14 October 1998.

The 1998 Nissan Art Project, one of the largest visual arts sponsorships in Ireland, has been awarded to the Irish sculptor Dorothy Cross. The project involves the creation of a ‘ghost ship’ from a decommissioned lightship, which will be anchored in Scotsmans Bay, off the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin. Ghost Ship was selected from a wide variety of proposals from eight countries for the £40,000 award. The decision of the international jury was announced today (Tuesday 26 May) at the Irish Museum of Modern Art by Mr Gerard O’Toole, Executive Chairman of Nissan Ireland, sponsors of the project.

The project is a personal homage by Dorothy Cross to the many lightships which once marked dangerous reefs around the Irish coast, but have now all but disappeared. The Ghost Ship will be covered in luminous paint and, at nightfall, illuminated to glow and fade, evoking the poignancy of the disappeared lightships and the artist’s childhood memories, linked to her father’s love of the sea. The project will be realised in October/November for a two to three week period.

Dorothy Cross’s fascination with lightships goes back to her childhood: “I grew up in Cork, where The Daunt was moored two miles off the coast. The Ghost Ship refers to the memory of the lightships, whose presence was held dear around the Irish coast. Except for three remaining lightships, the vessels have been replaced by automated satellite buoys. The role of the sea has diminished for the Irish people and the view is inwards towards the cities.” The original red, engineless lightships were moored to the bottom of the sea and were crewed by men for weeks on end. Each had large white letters naming the rocks they marked – Daunt, South Rock, Coningbeg, Kish, Lucifer, Barrels, Codling. Manned until 1974, they have now been decommissioned and replaced by automated, electronic buoys.

Commenting on the winning project Gerard O’Toole, Executive Chairman, Nissan Ireland said: “Once again this initiative has attracted many talented artists with innovative and appealing art projects. Ghost Ship is a gentle reminder of the importance of the lightship through a piece of “art” and it gives me great enthusiasm that this proposal will be realised for public appreciation”.

Declan McGonagle, Director, Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Chair of the jury panel, highlighted the growing international interest in the project said:
“Once again, the Nissan Art Project has drawn out a proposal which, though dealing with something familiar, is innovative and challenging, and represents a new way of looking at public art and its role in the environment. Dorothy
Cross’s Ghost Ship will activate the specific physical context of Dublin Bay and also the minds of its viewers. It is also encouraging to see how Irish artists like Dorothy Cross are now acknowledged as full participants in an international art process”

Born in Cork in 1956, Dorothy Cross’s work has attracted considerable international attention in recent years. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, Madrid and throughout the United Kingdom and has works in a number of prestigious public and private collections. In 1993 she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale and was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex Artists Award in 1995 and 1997. Using a variety of means ranging from casting and photography to taxidermy, Cross reinvents objects evoking personal and collective memories beyond their original form. These memories raise questions of love, sexuality, control, religion and death.

The Nissan Art Project, created and organised in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is intended to give artists working in any medium an opportunity to extend their practice to make a new temporary work for the public domain. This is defined as any space or process in the Dublin area to which the general public has ready unmediated access. The project was first realised in 1997 with For Dublin by Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones, which presented neon texts from Molly Bloom’s Ulysses monologue in nine city centre locations.

The members of the 1998 jury panel are Mary Jane Jacob, an independent curator based in Chicago; Sandra Percival, Director, Public Art Development
Trust, London; Tony Sheehan, Director, Firestation Studios, Dublin; Jim
Barrett, Dublin City Architect; Declan McGonagle, Director, and Brenda McParland, Senior Curator: Exhibitions, Irish Museum of Modern Art.

An exhibition of works created as part of a series of Education and Community programmes organised by the Irish Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with its highly-successful Andy Warhol exhibition opens to the public at the Museum on Saturday 30 May 1998. Wall of Myths includes paintings, prints, collages and drawings selected from works produced by a wide variety of groups, including primary school children, young people, adults and older people. In all, approximately 1,800 people participated in the programmes.

The exhibition illustrates the extraordinary range of creative responses to the theme of identity in Warhol’s work. It includes three-dimensional collages made by teachers exploring internal and external aspects of the self; hand-made books representing children’s thoughts and feelings through poetry, writings and drawings; and paintings and prints investigating colour, pattern and texture. For example, taking Warhol’s Campbells Soup Can prints as their inspiration, St Michael’s Primary School, Ballyfermot, made a series of paintings of their favourite foods, such as Cadbury’s Drinking Chocolate, Heinz Spaghetti and Avonmore Milk.

The exhibits are drawn from Andy and Me, a project developed by the Museum, in conjunction with the Department of Education and Science, involving Dublin-based schools participating in the Breaking the Cycle primary schools programme;Warhol to Wallpaper and Paint, Print, Pattern, Pop two classroom-based primary school projects in schools from Dublin, Kildare, Meath, Wicklow, Roscommon, Louth and Limerick; Focus on Warhol involved groups from Sunbeam House, Bray; the Drugs Task Force, Rialto; the Fatima After Schools Programme; the Active Retirement Association, Inchicore Art Group; and St Vincent’s Trust, Henrietta Street. The groups worked with artists Sally Douglas, Cliona Harmey, Úna Keeley, John Langan, Niamh Lawlor, Sandra Meehan, Liz McMahon, Kierán McNulty and Margaret Morrison.

Commenting on the background to the exhibition Helen O’Donoghue, Senior Curator: Education and Community, said: “Art is profoundly important for the full growth of the individual because it deals visually with ideas, feelings and experiences. By giving people access to a broad range of art materials and experience, with artists and art works of excellence, a programme such as this one, focussed on Warhol, seeks to create an atmosphere of genuine exploration of artistic and aesthetic expression, creative thinking and making.”

The exhibition continues until 20 September.