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The Devastation of the People

Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics‘ (1979/ 2001) is an objective study of rural Irish life in the small town of ‘Ballybran’ in the 1970s. Plagued by social and individual problems, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes was intrigued by the social life of the villagers and how their culture, language, religion, values, interactions, and way of life contributed to the community’s daily life and overall slow, yet steady decline through illness, emigration and isolation. Scheper-Hughes took particular interest in the prevalence of mental illness in rural communities, especially amongst men who often suffered from severe depression and schizophrenia.

On a recent return to Ireland in late March 2017, at the invitation of the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork (UCC), Scheper-Hughes appeared for two speaking engagements to discuss what was her first major work Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics‘, and how it has served as a source of inspiration for artist Duncan Campbell.  Campbell’s new film work The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy (2016) was, in part, inspired by Scheper-Hughes’ debut. In IMMA she spoke publicly with Campbell and Professor Luke Gibbons, reflecting on her experiences of tracing the social disintegration of a remote village in Ireland and her later attempts to reconcile an honest ethnography with the community. The talk held at IMMA was recorded and can be listened at the end of this blog post or on SoundCloud by clicking here. She then traveled to Cork on 3 April 2017 to speak with IMMA Director Sarah Glennie at UCC.

While Scheper-Hughes was staying at IMMA we invited Dr. Lisa Godson, Co-Director, MA Design History and Material Culture, NCAD to meet and interview Scheper-Hughes about this early work, and how its shaped her today.

Militant Anthropology

Since the start, Nancy Schepher Hughes has been drawn to tough subjects. Over the past forty years, her path-breaking writing has included: mental illness in Ireland, the violence of everyday life in Brazil, the experience of AIDS in Cuba and death squads in South Africa. As an anthropologist dedicated to fieldwork, her publications follow on from lengthy research undertaken while dwelling among those she writes about, who usually live and suffer in challenging and difficult environments. Her courage is almost legendary, and stems from an approach she outlined in ‘The Primacy of the Ethical’ (1995) an essay in which she advocated for a ‘militant anthropology’ that is grounded in political commitment. She contrasted this new ‘barefoot anthropologist’ with the traditional ‘neutral, dispassionate, cool and rational, objective observer of the human condition.’

This ‘militant’ approach has impelled her beyond the conventional boundaries of ethnographic fieldwork, particularly with her investigations into the global trade in human body parts including tissue, corneas and kidneys ‘harvested’ from the living and the dead. As well as numerous academic works, her activism includes the establishment of Organs Watch, an organisation that tracked the commodification of organs for transplant around the world, and her research led directly to the criminal prosecution of traffickers based in Israel and New York.

The Devastation of the People

For her first major research project, Scheper-Hughes and her family lived among the bachelor hill-farmers around An Clochán/Cloghane  in Co. Kerry. The village was imperfectly disguised as ‘Ballybran’ in Saints Scholars and Schizophrenics (1979), the study she produced (she now says ‘too quickly’) on her return to the USA. The book influenced Duncan Campbell’s IMMA commissioned artwork The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy (open until May 7 2017) and remains one of the most explosive commentaries ever published on Irish rural life. Starting as an investigation into the high rates of mental illness in Ireland, it addresses incest, schizophrenia, celibacy and the sorry figure of the younger son who was both patronised as the fool of the family and relied on to stay at home with his ageing parents, his life-chances limited, his ambitions atrophied.

Saints, Scholars (as she calls it, finding the full title ‘a little tacky’) was praised by academics; the author received the Margaret Mead Award for bringing anthropology to a broad audience. But among her readership were those she had studied and analysed, many of whom were appalled at the depiction of their community. When she was involved in the daily life of the village, certain locals were willing to speak to her, and some so keen that they ‘really were upset if I didn’t come every week so we could talk.’ In fact, she almost named her book The Confessional Conscience. But there was a tension between personal volubility and an intense desire for privacy: ‘pouring their heart out’ face-to-face did not prepare the informants for seeing their words permanently fixed in reproducible print. As Scheper-Hughes now says, by publishing and disseminating their intimacies they ‘felt I had violated them.’

As well as the figures of Valerie and Walter, the ethnographic film-makers who ventriloquise extracts from her writing, Campbell is informed by Scheper Hughes’s account of the dislocating effects of modernity. Shortly before she arrived in Kerry, the Irish Land Commission had introduced a voluntary retirement scheme that ‘devastated families’ by forcing subsistence farmers off the land, and she diagnoses at least some of their woes according to this loss.

The scheme was informed by Irish politicians wanting to adhere to European policies that encouraged consolidation and capitalization of farms, a process viewed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) as a ‘war against peasants’. Scheper Hughes sets her work alongside his study of celibate farmers in Les Bal des Célibataires/The Bachelors’ Ball (2002; trans. 2008) as well as John Berger’s fictional trilogy Into their Labours on the European peasant experience (1991). She knew Bourdieu, and says ‘we exchanged notes and said that it was a tragedy because people lost the meaning of their life, it became so demeaned as though they were rubbish people that could be thrown out, they were people that could be dispended, disregarded’.

Still from The Village, Mark McCarty, Walter Goldschmidt, Colin Young.
Still from The Village, Mark McCarty, Walter Goldschmidt, Colin Young.

When we met on her visit to IMMA in March 2017, she had seen The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy ‘two and a half times’ already. By the time of her public conversation with Duncan Campbell the following evening, she had been back to view the work twice more. Schepher Hughes felt that the film showed ‘the devastation of the people very very well’. She was captivated by the scene that showed empty lobster pots being drawn from the sea – ‘why are the fish disappearing? Where have the salmon gone? Where are the mackerel?’

Return

The revisiting of Campbell’s work echoes the theme of return that marks later editions of Saints and Scholars in such a painful way. The ‘twentieth anniversary’ version (2001) contains a lengthy preface in which she situates the original book within the context of her competing and even contradictory responsibilities as anthropologist and neighbor. In this, she recounts an intense visit back to ‘Ballybran’ in 1994. Schepher Hughes hoped she would be able to explain why she wrote the book as she did, and anticipated some kind of healing. But although some villagers had whispered or written thanks to her for telling the truth, she was advised to leave before the planned meeting, and departed without any reconciliation.

The new epilogue ‘Crediting An Clochán’ is in part a response to a villager’s remark that ‘ya just didn’t give us credit’, and in it she recounts some of the happier aspects of life in West Kerry in the 1970s. These include friendliness, safety and egalitarianism between men and women. Her resolution to re-visit, to explain, to historicise and contextualize the work has been admired, this tenacity one aspect of her bravery. In a way, it seems, that early experience in Ireland informed her later ‘barefoot’ approach that tries to harmonise the pressures of advancing academic knowledge with directly serving those she writes about. But a sadness remains, and Scheper Hughes says ‘before I die I want there to be a reconciliation and I don’t know what it will take but I’m going to keep at it.’

About the Author

imageLisa Godson is a historian of design and material culture, and also researches and writes about contemporary design. She studied History of Art at Trinity College Dublin (BA 1994) and History of Design at the Royal College of Art/Victoria & Albert Museum, London (MA 1998, PhD 2008). Godson has held tenured lecturing posts in a number of institutions including DIT and the Royal College of Art, where she was lead tutor in critical studies for MA design interaction, product design and industrial design. She was RCA Teaching and Learning Fellow and devised the college Virtual Learning Environment RCAde. She was NCAD Fellow at the inter-institutional Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) 2009-13, where she was part of the team that developed and taught a pioneering structured doctoral research programme and chaired two research seminars, in historiography and theories of contemporary design.

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Studio 10 Adult Programme at IMMA

If you’ve ever wanted to experience something more creatively hands-on in relation to IMMA’s exciting programme of changing exhibitions, there are several programmes that use exploratory art-making to give you a richer understanding of the artworks and exhibitions on show in the galleries. Developed and run by IMMA’s Engagement and Learning  department (previously called ‘Education and Community’) these programmes are facilitated both by invited artists and art practitioners and our in-house facilitators from IMMA’s Visitor Engagement Team. These art-making activities focus on creative process and experimentation and are incorporated into a whole range of programming that caters for families, children, teenagers, third level groups, and adults.

For this blog we spoke to Caroline Orr (Engagement and Learning) and Joan Walker (Visitor Engagement Team) to hear more about one of the longest running of these programmes – “Studio 10” . This art-making workshop series takes place in three or four week blocks on Friday mornings, 10am to 1pm, in an autumn/winter and spring/summer schedule.  Each block focuses on a single current exhibition and explores the themes and techniques used in the making of the artworks presented in the galleries.  This involves several visits and tours to the gallery spaces, and lots of discussion, which then leads to a practical session of making in the studio. Officially called the Adult Gallery/Studio Programme it has become known as “Studio 10” – the number of the IMMA studio in which the art-making takes place. “Studio10” is free of charge and you don’t need to book in advance, you can just drop along on the day.

To give you a better idea of what the workshops feel like, we’ve taken a closer look at a recent project developed by the group.  In November 2016 Studio 10 was exploring the work of Jaki Irvine’s new work: “If the Ground Should Open.” which was on exhibition in the Courtyard Galleries. An IMMA Commission, the work is a multichannel video and sound installation commemorating the often forgotten role women played in the 1916 Easter Rising. Using themes from this work such as commemoration and the role of memory Visitor Engagement Facilitators Barry Kehoe and Joan Walker devised a specific workshop for Studio 10 participants to make their own collaborative video work. Joan describes how the idea came about and how the film was made.

Joan tells us more:
The idea for this workshop began by honing down the Jaki Irvine piece to its essential core, which is to honour the name of a remembered person. In her case it was the memory of the women who played important roles in the 1916 Rising. To say a person’s name can be powerful, even in general conversation. It makes us pay attention, it’s grounding and it makes us feel recognised.

When Barry and I took this idea to the Studio 10 group our first step was to ask the group to think about someone who had meaning for us; perhaps someone we loved, honoured or respected. This could be someone from the past or the present, someone known intimately or even someone we had never met. We sat quietly with our memories, letting them flow to the surface and allowing the chosen person’s name to fill our heads, fill our mouths with its vibrations and then to whisper and speak out that name and indulge in its vowels and rhythms. The next step was to take a pencil to paper and begin to write the name and then to progress this further by doodling with the name, playing with it, decorating it, growing it on paper. We spoke about illuminated texts where initials are glorified in gold and jewel like colours or the bright primaries of pop culture and writing the name like a popstar or in love hearts like sweethearts, the type carved in trees or graffiti on to bathroom doors.

Soon there was spontaneous writing, drawing or collaging. There was complete silence in the studio, the concentration was immense as everyone, locked in their thoughts, began a visual memorial to their chosen name.

At our next session the following week we introduced a selection of percussion instruments, to pick up from the music at the centre of Irvine’s work. We gathered in a circle and began to improvise with sound. In their own time each person allowed their special person to come forward in their mind and let it flow to their hands and their instruments so they could honour that name in sound. Immediately some people began to sing, hum or shout out their chosen name. The Studio filled with wonderful sound and the cacophony was all the time being recorded on a mobile recording desk.

Following this it was time to record the actual speaking of the chosen name. During the recording process many participants recounted cherished memories of their person. Neither Barry nor I could have anticipated the outpouring of honesty, emotion and rich tales that would go on to weave this wonderful tapestry of sound and vision.

The next and final stage was to photograph the drawings which were combined with the recordings to produce this truly heartfelt memorable piece of art.

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Behind the Blink. Freud Project Advertising Campaign

IMMA Collection: Freud Project is a landmark exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art around one of the greatest realist painters of the 20th century, Lucian Freud (1922-2011). The current exhibition features a selection of 30 of the artist’s finest paintings and 20 works on paper.

To celebrate this extraordinary exhibition we asked Dublin-based advertising agency Irish International BBDO to created a 20 second advertisement for television, cinema, display, digital and social media that would capture the feeling of seeing a Freud work in the flesh. We absolutely loved the result, and hope you do to! Everything you see below was achieved in camera with NO special effects or computer generated imagery – this is a model sitting very, very still with her face brilliantly painted…with an eye-opening twist.  Don’t believe us? Read on to watch a time-lapse of the whole process.
Original 20″ Advert:

II BBDO Creative Director Dylan Cotter, who nicknamed the ad ‘facetime’, explains the concept:

The difference between looking at Freud’s portraits on a screen or in a book or catalogue, versus seeing them ‘in the flesh’ – is profound. Rachel and myself visited the exhibition in December and our reactions differed in many respects, but we both felt that. Part of it was the physics of the paint, the depth of it. And part of it was just spending time. For me, it was only after a little while of staring and exploring, that I noticed how in every portrait the eyes were these points of quite fierce stability amongst all these swirls and eddies of withering, weathering flesh. We wanted to capture that in our ad.

Quite literally invoking people to see this work ‘in the flesh’; but also making that point on a more emotive and less literal level.

At the exhibition we read a quote from Freud, next to Man in a check cap: “As far as I’m concerned, the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.”

This sparked a thought with Rachel, to play with that relationship between the paint and the painted.

We were incredibly lucky to find a make-up artist here in Dublin – Caitríona Giblin – who is as good as anyone, anywhere, at achieving the effect we were after.

Behind-the-Scenes Timelapse

We are very proud of the fact that the finished work was completely achieved in camera. One take, no cheats or fixes or embellishments, no CGI tricks. This is a real model with a painted face, standing in front of a painted backdrop (also by Caitríona), and opening her eyes.

It’s a simple and hopefully resonant comment on Freud’s ability to truly connect the viewer of the portrait with the subject of the portrait, in a startling and transcendent way. Go to the exhibition and you’ll see what we mean!

Like any piece of creative work, experimentation was an important part in the making of this ad. While the general concept and story had been planned before the final shoot took place, the team saw an opportunity to play with the idea and expand it further. The result is a series of videos where one is more playful and cheeky than the last. Playful and dramatic

Freud painted from life, and usually spend a great deal of time with each subject, demanding the model’s presence even while working on the background of the portrait. His portraits depict people he was close to; friends, family, lovers, and the like as he wished to capture his subjects alongside his interactions with them, stating:

The subject matter is autobiographical, it’s all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really..

His subjects usually recall having to devote enormous amounts of their time for an uncertain period of commitment.  Freud’s portraits could take weeks or even months to complete and required extensive dedication and focus from his subjects which sometimes led to emotional and physical discomfort. Perhaps the following take is the result of a similar experience felt by the production team (we hope not!).

Our model had excellent control over her eyebrow muscles. We were impressed.
Kiss, kiss. Wink wink.

While the production team had a lot of fun directing these different takes during filming the restrained drama of the model’s first take was ultimately the most fitting and striking moment captured on the day. Her subtle movement beautifully translates the connection a viewer can feel when standing in front of one of Lucian Freud’s portraits.

We wish to extend our sincerest gratitude to the team at Irish International BBDO  and and all the individuals who donated their time and expertise to this campaign.

Creative Director: Dylan Cotter
Art Director: Rachel Foley
Producer and Editor: Georgia Stevenson
Post Production: Lee Miller
Account Manager: Lorna Begg
DOP: Martin Osborne
Makeup Artist: Caitríona Giblin
Model: Deirdre J Lynam
Kevin Breathnach (Avondale Studio)
IMMA Collection: Freud Project is now open. Tickets are available online and advanced booking in strongly recommended. Find out more here.

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To Be Determined (for Jean), Emily Jacir workshop

As we enter the final weekend of Emily Jacir’s exhibition at IMMA ‘Europa’, ending this Sunday 26 February, we hear from Emily Jacir on the second week of her workshop “To Be Determined (for Jean)” which took place during the month of January in conjunction with her exhibition.

Conceived and organised by Jacir, in collaboration with IMMA, the workshop was based around a student collaboration with Jacir’s students from the International Academy of Art Palestine, Ramallah and a number of Irish students. IMMA invited colleges throughout Ireland to nominate students to participate, resulting in students from Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD); Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Centre for Creative Arts and Media (GMIT  CCAM); the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin and Dublin School of Creative Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT).

In the second week of the workshop the students traveled to the Burren College of Art, Co. Clare where they worked with Conor McGrady and Áine Phillips. On their return to Dublin they participated in workshops by artists Gerard Byrne and Shane Cullen. Here we hear from Emily Jacir and the participants in the programme, both artists and students, on their reflections on the second week and what the workshop meant to them.

Read the blog from week one by Emily Jacir and the participants in the programme.

Emily Jacir’s new installation at IMMA, “Notes for a Cannon”, which she describes as throwing open her sketchbook, constellates histories of Palestine and Ireland in a magnetic field of correspondence and convergence. We could think of the two week-long workshop as aiming at something similar: not a process of instruction or “information delivery”, but an ongoing, collective sketch-work that kept discovering past and present interconnections between two sites that are geographically remote but bound together by actual and analogical links. Both the land and the culture of Ireland and Palestine are marked by imperialism and settler colonialism and by an enduring resistance to them. The fragmentary and episodic connections traced between them may look like the debris of historical damage, but are charged with the openness to the future that the imagination and forging of life in common inspires. – David Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.

My workshop To Be Determined (for Jean) started on 23 January at IMMA (read my dispatch from week one) and in our second week we kicked off by heading to the Burren College of Art on Sunday to spend a few days there. On the first day there we went to see the Atlantic Ocean and the Cliffs in the morning. Then it was back to the Burren College of Art (who hosted us and where we stayed) for Conor McGrady‘s seminar: “Visual Culture & The Irish Conflict: Incarceration, Resistance, & the State.”

Conor McGrady Seminar at the Burren College of Art
Conor McGrady Seminar at the Burren College of Art

On our second day at the Burren we started with a drawing seminar in the beautiful studios of the Burren College of Art, pictured below. This session focused on using drawing as a way for the students to process in their own language the many things they have been confronted with on this journey together.

Drawing workshop, Burren School of Art
Drawing workshop, Burren School of Art

After lunch Áine Phillips presented us with her lecture entitled “Contemporary Live Art: Colonialism and Gender in Ireland”. This was followed by a field trip to an abandoned famine village. The day ended in the castle at the Burren College of Art where a fire was lit and local musicians and poets from County Clare came and shared their gifts with us.

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Burren College of Art was pleased to participate in Emily Jacir’s workshop, that brought a group of her students from the International Academy of Art Palestine to Ireland to work with students from four Irish colleges over a two week period. At BCA seminars were complimented with intensive discussion, reflection and visual documentation/drawing in response to issues impacting art and politics in Ireland and Palestine. Emily’s workshop comes in the wake of the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising and at a critical conjuncture in contemporary global politics. In engaging with Ireland’s past and Palestine’s present, it posed important questions on the role of the artist in responding to the social, cultural and political legacies of colonialism and conflict. It was an honor to work with Emily in this important initiative, and to share time, space and discussion with such a dynamic group of committed and enthusiastic students.– Conor McGrady, Burren College of Art.

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The second week of the workshop was again a fantastic experience, travelling to the Burren gave a great insight into the more rural aspects of Irish history and culture, between that, the drawing workshop and an array of great lectures and discussions not to mention invaluable tutorials from a range of people at the top of their profession I have been left with new insights and a rich vain of useful ideas that can feed directly into my work now and into the future – Conor Burke (GMIT- CCAM)

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After our return to Dublin we wrapped up the last few days of the workshop with seminars with artists Gerard Byrne and Shane Cullen (pictured below) regarding their practice. Gerard and Shane and I also conducted one on one tutorials with the students to discuss their work and the new projects they are embarking on inspired by the workshop.

Gerard Byrne, Emily Jacir and Shane Cullen
Gerard Byrne, Emily Jacir and Shane Cullen

During the workshop we have been introduced to many inspiring people and stories. We are only beginning to process all the information, and I am sure it will stay with us for a long time. Being away from the college working structure, working with different artists is also a great opportunity for us to look at our own work from a wider perspective. Personally, I have not only found out more about Ireland and Palestine and their relationship, but also about my own identity and my own relationship with Ireland. – Oliwia Nowak (LSAD)

Final dinner with artists, students, participants in IMMA's Residency communal house.
Final dinner with artists, students, participants in IMMA’s Residency communal house.

The workshop has been over for nearly a month now and I’m still picking apart and digesting the experiences that were cultivated during those intense two weeks. In my mind, the second week of the workshop is a blur of wild landscapes hurtling past the windows of our bus, beautiful food shared with beautiful friends and songs sung in both familiar and unfamiliar languages (of which I still find myself idly humming along to). I rediscovered the power of drawing. I was reminded of the value of song and spoken word. I learnt about the importance of making work locally, for yourself and for your neighbours. It’s difficult trying to chronicle or sum up the happenings of the workshop and I think it would not be helpful to do so right now. I can only express my undivided gratitude to the many wonderful people I was fortunate enough to meet. May this be only the beginning. – Yurika Boo.

Emily’s proposal for a student workshop, which she presented to IMMA’s Engagement and Learning team during the early planning stages of her exhibition, provided a way for IMMA to further explore how we can be a support and locus for research and student interaction. The collaborative approach of the workshop involved many individuals and organisations coming together through seminars, lectures, site visits, excursions, and also meals which provided important opportunities for the learning and experience to be digested. Taking place against the backdrop of Emily’s exhibition at IMMA, this student workshop provides a rich model for future student collaboration and exchange which we hope to build on in the development of IMMA as a site for research and learning. – Lisa Moran, Curator: Engagement and Learning, IMMA. 

About the Author

Emily Jacir. Photo John McRae, 2016.
Emily Jacir. Photo John McRae, 2016.

Emily Jacir’s recent solo exhibitions include IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Dublin (2016 – 2017); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Darat il Funun, Amman (2014-2015); Beirut Art Center (2010); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009). Jacir’s works have been in important group exhibitions internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; dOCUMENTA (13) (2012); 5 consecutive Venice Biennales, 29th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2010); 15th Biennale of Sydney (2006); Sharjah Biennial 7 (2005); Whitney Biennial (2004); and the 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003). Jacir is the recipient of several awards, including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); a Prince Claus Award (2007); the Hugo Boss Prize (2008); the Herb Alpert Award (2011); and the Rome Prize (2015).

In 2003 O.K. Books published belongings. a monograph on a selection of Jacir’s work. A second monograph was published by Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst Nurnberg (2008). Her book ex libris was published in 2012 by Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln. In 2015 The Khalid Shoman Foundation published A Star is as Far as the Eye Can See and as Near as My Eye is to Me the most extensive monograph to date on Jacir’s work in English and Arabic. The most recent publication on her work are Europa which accompanies the exhibitions at Whitechapel and IMMA. Earlier this year NERO, Roma published TRANSLATIO about Jacir’s permanent installation Via Crucis at the Chiesa di San Raffaele in Milano. She has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 including PIVF and Birzeit University. Over the past ten years she has been a full-time professor and active member of the vanguard International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah. She conceived of and co-curated the first Palestine International Video Festival in Ramallah in 2002. She also curated a selection of shorts; “Palestinian Revolution Cinema (1968 -1982)” which went on tour in 2007. Jacir is on the faculty of Bard MFA in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

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Introducing AZURE at IMMA. Living with dementia

Are you living with dementia or do you know someone who is? IMMA is one of the lead partners of a programme called ‘Azure’ which aims to make art galleries and museums around Ireland dementia-friendly spaces. Azure explores how people with dementia-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s, and the people who care for them, can have a deeper involvement in cultural institutions and can participate in cultural activities.

Inspired by the ‘Meet Me at MoMA’ programme at MoMA, New York, Azure offers guided exhibition tours specifically designed to support people living with dementia and their family, friends or professional carers, to engage with the art work on show and enjoy a social museum experience.

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Being in the moment with visual art

Ciaran McKinney, Head of Arts and Culture at Age and Opportunity, says the arts are increasingly recognised “as being really helpful for people living with dementia. In an interview with the Irish Times he spoke about how “It can be an experience of being in the now. It’s not about the past. Also, it’s not about needing to refer only to safe material. People with dementia have the same rights as the rest of us to be shown something that is challenging, new or avant garde. To really hate an art work is just as valid as loving a piece”.
Continue reading Introducing AZURE at IMMA. Living with dementia

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To Be Determined (for Jean), Emily Jacir workshop

This month we are presenting “To Be Determined” a workshop with artist Emily Jacir in conjunction with her current exhibition at IMMA – Europa (26 November 2016 – 26 February 2017). Conceived and organised by Jacir the workshop is based around a student exchange and we are delighted to welcome her students from the International Academy of Art Palestine, Ramallah to Dublin. They are in IMMA to work with Irish students from colleges around Ireland including Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD); Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Centre for Creative Arts and Media (GMIT  CCAM); the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin and Dublin School of Creative Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT).The workshop is taking place over two consecutive weeks in IMMA and also in a number of locations around Ireland, including Belfast, the Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry/Londonderry (CCA Derry~Londonderry), and the Burren College of Art, Co. Clare. Jacir has invited a number of artists and writers to contribute to the workshop including Gerard Byrne, Shane Cullen,Willie Doherty,David Lloyd, Declan Long, Conor McGrady, Áine Phillips, and Maggie Royanye. Below we hear from Emily Jacir and the participants in the programme, both artists and students, on their reflections after week one.

Workshop participants in session with David Lloyd and Emily Jacir at IMMA
Workshop participants in session with David Lloyd and Emily Jacir at IMMA

IMMA are hosting a brilliant initiative right now, as part of the extended Engagement and Learning programme around Emily Jacir’s show. Together with the museum, Emily has brought together a group of nine students, from the International Academy of Art Palestine, GMIT, LSAD, DIT and NCAD, for an intensive series of discussions and reflections around the politics and the art of Ireland and Palestine through the prism of Post-Colonialism. Parallels as well as differences are being teased out in the IMMA artist residency studios, as well as on bus trips to Belfast, Derry, and the Burren School of Art, where students are tapping into a network of ties that Emily has built up on Ireland and abroad with some of the more challenging and interesting Irish artists, including Willie Doherty, Shane Cullen, and writers like David Lloyd, and Declan Long. I’m involved, and really enjoying it.
– Gerard Byrne (Artist)

Artist Emily Jacir with workshop participants in her IMMA exhibition Europa
Artist Emily Jacir with workshop participants in her IMMA exhibition Europa

My workshop To Be Determined (for Jean) kicked off last Sunday January 23rd at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. My students from the International Academy of Art Palestine, Ramallah, joined Irish students from colleges around Ireland to take part in a workshop I designed and organized in conjunction with my show at IMMA Europa (26 November 2016 – 26 February 2017).

It was very important for me to conduct this workshop in tandem with my show for many reasons but namely because of the long relationship I have with Ireland its impact on my work. Many of the themes which run through my exhibition at IMMA are being touched upon in this workshop. Additionally the colleagues I have invited to contribute to my workshop are people I have been working with for decades and almost all have worked in Palestine. So the workshop is not only built along the lines of my own research, explorations and interests but also in line with a long history of exchange and collaboration with Willie Doherty, Conor McGrady, Gerard Byrne, Shane Cullen, and David Lloyd among many others.

In my view this workshop also joins an enduring history of solidarity between Ireland and Palestine and so we will also be investigating not only that history of solidarity and collaboration but also the current situation of Palestinian prisoners (the role of prisoners in both Ireland and South Africa played crucial roles in ending those conflicts) as well as popular techniques used by the Irish (and also South Africans) which have served to inspire Palestinian efforts to resist occupation. As Europa opened during the centenary of the 1916 Easter Uprising and with the shared history of British colonial rule in Palestine and Ireland (remnants of which still abound today) it was especially crucial to me to bring these students and thinkers together to examine these histories in a critical way.

This workshop has been such an amazing experience, from the trips to historically significant sites in Dublin, Belfast and Derry to the interaction with other students from Ireland and Palestine. The sharing of different views, opinions and ideas it has provided so much food for thought and source material for the development of artistic works. The warmth and hospitality of the accommodation has only been exceeded by that of all the people I have met at this workshop. – Conor Burke (GMIT – CCAM)

Workshop participants on the Falls Road in Belfast
Workshop participants on the Falls Road in Belfast

It has been amazing to meet the other students from Palestine and Ireland; sharing our perspectives and discussing our ideas has been mentally stimulating. The seminars, lecturers and visits to Northern Ireland taught me more about the conflicts and history, as well as learning more about the history and present of Palestine. Overall, the workshop has been overwhelmingly rich and fascinating, and I’m honoured to be a part of it. – Tuyen Tran (DIT)

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At the core of this workshop is a focus on the events and discourse surrounding the Easter Uprising of 1916 in Dublin. For this reason it was essential to me to organize a visit to Kilmainham Gaol (above) and the Royal Hospital Kilmainham (where IMMA is housed) upon arrival in Dublin so that the students would understand the site and buildings in which we are working in and having our discussions in. I invited my colleagues to lead seminars that would interrogate themes such as resistance, the right of return, martyrs, independence, remembrance and commemoration from a variety of different perspectives.  We kicked off the first half of the week with a fantastic seminar led by David Lloyd called “Founding Violence:Rethinking Easter 1916”.

In investigating the postcolonial condition of Ireland, we are examining how this violent colonial history and these invasive disruptions of social, cultural, religious and political orders play out in contemporary Ireland today and how it continues to shape our present condition.  Wednesday we headed to Belfast for a tour of the Falls Road Murals guided by a former political prisoner. This was followed by a seminar with former political prisoners from the Republican and the Loyalist communities, as well as a former British soldier.

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After our return to IMMA we continued the workshop with a couple of seminars led by artist Gerard Byrne exploring the role of the artist in imagining the state. In smaller group meetings with Gerard, the students were able to start to process the impact of the workshop in relation to their own practices. Declan Long’s seminar on Friday “Ghost Stories: Contemporary art and the uneasy peace of post-conflict Northern Ireland” (above) presented us with various forms of concrete examples of art projects.

We completed this first week with a trip to Derry, which included a seminar with Willie Doherty at CCA (where we were hosted by CCA Director Matt Packer and Curator Sarah Greavu . Willie spoke about his practice and his very personal relationship to this place and then led us on an intimate walking tour of Derry which included the sites of his works, as pictured below.

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Being in Ireland made me realize even more that fighting against injustice, oppression and discrimination is a global fight and not only a Palestinian one, regardless of demographics, geography, culture or religion. Also, listening to all these historical and social struggles the Irish overcame drew a very promising picture of freedom in the near future for Palestine.Also, being around the liberal and distinguished minds of the Irish and Palestinian students, and having the opportunity to visit the outstanding artworks at IMMA has been a great influence and motivation on me.In short, I just loved the smiling faces, the loving hospitality and the passion for politics I’ve seen in the Irish. – May Marei (IAAP)

Workshop students and participants eating lunch together in IMMA's artist studios
Workshop students and participants eating lunch together in IMMA’s artist studios
You can hear more from Emily about her current exhibition at IMMA here (video) The exhibition is free of charge and runs at IMMA, Dublin until 26 February 2017.

About the Author

Emily Jacir. Photo John McRea, 2016.
Emily Jacir. Photo John McRea, 2016.

Emily Jacir’s recent solo exhibitions include IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Dublin (2016 – 2017); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Darat il Funun, Amman (2014-2015); Beirut Art Center (2010); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009). Jacir’s works have been in important group exhibitions internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; dOCUMENTA (13) (2012); 5 consecutive Venice Biennales, 29th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2010); 15th Biennale of Sydney (2006); Sharjah Biennial 7 (2005); Whitney Biennial (2004); and the 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003). Jacir is the recipient of several awards, including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); a Prince Claus Award (2007); the Hugo Boss Prize (2008); the Herb Alpert Award (2011); and the Rome Prize (2015).

In 2003 O.K. Books published belongings. a monograph on a selection of Jacir’s work. A second monograph was published by Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst Nurnberg (2008). Her book ex libris was published in 2012 by Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln. In 2015 The Khalid Shoman Foundation published A Star is as Far as the Eye Can See and as Near as My Eye is to Me the most extensive monograph to date on Jacir’s work in English and Arabic. The most recent publication on her work are Europa which accompanies the exhibitions at Whitechapel and IMMA. Earlier this year NERO, Roma published TRANSLATIO about Jacir’s permanent installation Via Crucis at the Chiesa di San Raffaele in Milano. She has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 including PIVF and Birzeit University. Over the past ten years she has been a full-time professor and active member of the vanguard International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah. She conceived of and co-curated the first Palestine International Video Festival in Ramallah in 2002. She also curated a selection of shorts; “Palestinian Revolution Cinema (1968 -1982)” which went on tour in 2007. Jacir is on the faculty of Bard MFA in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

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Time, Space and Presence: Open House Junior at IMMA

This October IMMA hosted an exciting workshop for teens, as part of Irish Architecture Foundation’s Open House Dublin.The session was an exploration of space and time by an impressive group of young people, and was facilitated by Paola Catizone and A. Legarreta (‘maken’) from the IMMA Visitor Engagement Team. As we look back at the year that was we wanted to capture some of our highlights, so have asked Paola and maken to share their memories of the event.

The overall theme for the workshop was Time, Space and Presence, which takes as its cue the current exhibition IMMA Collection: A Decade. This collection exhibition is framed by a defined period of time – the last decade – and  includes many works that are time-based or time-related. Many of the works also underline the importance of ‘presence’.

In our workshop we engaged with several different spaces at IMMA: the grounds; the West Wing Gallery to view A Decade, and Studio 10 – one of the studio spaces on site. We focused on the contrast between linear time (where time is an absolute physical reality, and where the passage of time is independent of consciousness) versus ‘being in the now’, and on the effect of architectural space on human daily experience.

We started in the grounds of IMMA with maken, using a Time Machine…

Open House Dublin at IMMA, 2016
Open House Dublin at IMMA, 2016

We built a Time Machine with the group. Yes, we did.

Participants assembled at the base camp/Studio 10 to meet their crewmates and be briefed on the space-time hopping planned for the day. The usual safety announcements were made, including the possibility that we would all be vaporized in the time machine, accidentally transported to Mars, etc, etc.

304 seconds later (4 seconds behind schedule, but we are at IMMA, not NASA), we left base camp. The Krono-nauts, aka Time-travellers, marched in formation to the designated launch site South of the RHK Clock Tower (yes, most appropriate). As we marched, we signaled our presence by our team flag – a pair of futuristic wings that flapped in the air as we walked. We carried with us our very own home-made Time Machine, which, conveniently, had been designed to fit into a bucket (see image above). The Machine consisted of an ‘electomagnetic’ gold-silver ‘aeronautical’ drapery, 16.2m long, threaded with our own imaginary experimental metal alloy, immanite™…  and we were off!
After announcing the first destination, the Krono-nauts were asked to close their eyes. With a din of strange machine-sounds (closely resembling the ding-ding of a pantry-bell and the gong of… well… a meditation-Gong), we navigated through the space-time continuum, for what really and truly felt like 5 seconds. Without opening our eyes, like human-compasses, the crew were instructed to turn their bodies south-east to face the exact location. When they opened their eyes, the pilot described the building/ structure/ site they were beholding…

This space-time jump was repeated a number of times. Among other destinations we travelled to….

…the year 974, the outskirts of Dubh Linn in Hibernia. A hut Built by a young hermit called Maignenn, later known as ‘the place of Maignenn, or… ‘Kill-Mainham’.

…1679, Paris, France. ‘Les Invalides’ building. Officer Arthur Forbes falls in love with this military retirement home and persuades king Charles II to build a replica in Dublin.

…1880, Kandahar, Afġānistān. The site of an anti-colonial battle. A burial place will be erected in the IMMA gardens for a member of the British colonial troops at Kandahar. The warrior, who received a medal from Queen Victoria, was Volonel, an Arab horse.

…1940, Berlin, Deutschland. Detlev-Rohwedder building, the largest office building in Europe, headquarters of the Reich Air Ministry. A nameless secretary files a photograph of the RHK taken by the Luftwaffe. The file, called ‘Operation Green’, holds tactical information for a Nazi invasion of Ireland.

After several such space-time jumps, and safely returned to the launch-site, Krono-nauts were told that they had all now become Human Time Machines, with the ability to take other people back in time to all those places they had learned about, simply by repeating the stories they had heard.

We then moved to the West Wing to explore Old and New” tour, with Paola

Amanda Coogan, Medea, 2001, chromogenic print from digital file, mounted on diabond, 92 x 123 cm, edition 2/3, IMMA Collection
Amanda Coogan, Medea, 2001, chromogenic print from digital file, mounted on diabond, 92 x 123 cm, edition 2/3, IMMA Collection

Within A Decade, we looked at works by Mark Dion, Kevin Atherton, Amanda Coogan, Corban Walker, Alexis Harding, Dennis Mc Nulty and Philippe Taaffe as each one of these works invites reflections on the passing of time, with materials, media and use of space carefully and deliberately chosen by the artists to create sharp contrasts between present and past. Each art work inhabits the surrounding space on its own terms, sparking up a dynamic between contemporary art and historical architecture. The walls of the RHK are soaked in history and yet they comfortably host artworks that, while  in conversation with the past, are of the present and speak to it.

Atherton’s performative video installation is one of IMMA’s latest acquisitions supported by The Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA Collection. It consists of projections of two videos featuring present time Atherton in dialogue with his younger self, one filmed in 1978 and another in 2014. The older film has been re-edited to simulate this dialogue, and the arrangement of the projections within the room forces viewers to turn to look left and right, to follow the conversation, in a way that makes us participate in the performance.

Harding examines time from a different perspective. By using two painting mediums –oil and emulsion—with different drying times the artist can exhibit wet, dripping paintings which continue to form and change as you watch them, changing over time to dynamic effect.

McNulty’s multi-media installation, also supported through the Hennessy Art Fund, takes as its point of departure texts from Olaf Stapleton’s fictitious timeline for ‘Last and First Men‘, which he displays in a looped LCD. The timeline imaginatively extends from prehistory to a dystopian future threatened by a solar catastrophe. The windows in the room are partially covered by orange gel sheets while foil plaster boards reconfigure the shape of the walls and an acapella version of  “The sun always shines on TV” by Norwegian 1980s band A-ha is the looped sound track. We find ourselves immersed within a sensory environment that hints at a future human existence lived in synthetic, manmade spaces surrounded by a threatening external world, no longer habitable.

In the studio

Open House Dublin at IMMA, 2016
Open House Dublin at IMMA, 2016
Open House Dublin at IMMA, 2016
Open House Dublin at IMMA, 2016
Open House Dublin at IMMA, 2016
Open House Dublin at IMMA, 2016

Having looked at the work in the galleries and explored the grounds the group decamped to the studio where they were invited to respond to the exhibition in ways that were physically active and sensorily rich – breaking away from a traditional reliance on the use of paints and crayons to make art.

The workshops started with an ice-breaker name-game, a visualization on architectural space, and a movement exercise by Augusto Boal. In another exploration we imagined the world at various stages in the next 1,000 years, a sci-fi fantasy as a response to Dennis McNulty’s installation, with the resulting texts jumbled up and read anonymously: “I don’t think there will be a planet Earth in the future”, one read, and “Aliens will live among us”, another. The group also created an installation built by writing their hopes for the future on coloured strips of paper, and attaching them to thread crisscrossing the Studio space: “Clean water for everyone” and “Infinite Knowledge” could be read. The process was simple but the result was visually and emotionally impactful. It was a privilege to witness this young group’s hopes and thoughts on the future. May all their hopes come true!

Open House Dublin at IMMA, 2016
Open House Dublin at IMMA, 2016

 

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IMMA Shop: Christmas 2016

Shop IMMA this Christmas


We’re all familiar with the challenge that gift giving brings this time of year; how and where to find original presents for your loved ones of all ages. As always, the IMMA Shop has a beautiful offer with a selection of creative and unique gifts. Prices start from as little as €5 and there is a great selection of Irish and International design and craft, jewellery, art books, toys, art prints, or a year-long art experience from IMMA through membership (now available for purchase online here).

Making a purchase from the IMMA Shop is rewarding for both gift-giver and receiver. Not only will you be supporting Irish art, and spending time within IMMA and the beautiful, historic grounds of Royal Hospital Kilmainham, avoiding the congestion of the city centre and main shopping areas, but you’ll also be supporting our work at IMMA and the work of independent artists and suppliers. Continue below to explore some of the items we’re most excited about (and the gifts we’re secretly hoping to receive, ourselves).

imma-membershipIMMA Membership

Membership has its benefits. For only €50 (€30 concession), you can give the gift of membership to one of Ireland’s most vital art organisations. Membership includes invitations to exclusive events, talks, lectures, and openings, discounts on purchases from the IMMA Shop and Limited Art Editions, free teas and coffees from the Itsa Café and unlimited entry to IMMA exhibitions where an admission fee applies, like the landmark exhibition of Lucian Freud work currently open until October 2017 and beyond. Explore the levels of membership here.


SNOW

fiona-snow-christmas-robinHusband and wife team Fiona Snow and Michael Mohler combine technology, precision, creativity and design in their Irish-made work. We currently carry a vast collection of affordable laser-cut design in the form of wooden tree ornaments, household decorations and paper stationary. All products are designed and made by SNOW in their Dublin studio. The layered coloured paper used in the creation of stationary and small art prints is particularly stunning.

 

Wolf & Moon

wallpaper-necklace-mint-750_1024x1024Jewellery made from a combination of woods, metals, acrylics and fabrics to create individual pieces inspired by geometry and the natural world. Wolf & Moon is owned and operated by British designer Hannah Davis in her East London studio, where each piece is handmade with care. The range is exclusive to IMMA Shop in Ireland and we carry a broad selection of Wolf & Moon’s best pieces.

 

Hans Christian Andersen and Sanna Annukka

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The IMMA Shop has an extensive collection of books for all ages and interests, but the two newest seasonal additions are The Fir Tree and The Snow Queen by prolific Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. These two classics have been re-released by Penguin Books with new illustrations by Finnish-British artist Sanna Annukka. These two books display Scandanavian-inspired beauty at its best and are suitable gifts for lovers of design and texture and readers of all ages and levels.

Love & Robots

1510546_401181523368177_6941410000321811251_nInspired by contemporary culture, geometry, architecture, graphic design and urban life, Love & Robots use bright, colourful nylon and beautiful precious metals to create jewellery to suit unique individuals and their personalities. A new addition to the IMMA Shop for December, we have teamed with Love & Robots to offer a selection of their most popular and vibrant pieces at an affordable price.


Freud Exhibition Pack

Reflection (Self Portrait), 1985 (oil on canvas)Give a truly unique cultural experience this Christmas by gifting a loved one fifty works by Lucian Freud…or at least the experience of visiting these beautiful works currently on display in the Freud Centre as part of the IMMA Collection: Freud Project. You can even take some of the works home in the form of a limited edition poster, postcard pack, magnet, notebook, and a beautiful new Freud book, fully illustrated with all fifty works, an introduction from Curator and Head of Collections Christina Kennedy and 31 responses from contemporary artists to Freud’s work.  Included in this pack are a complementary visitor’s voucher for two (RRP €16), the Freud book (RRP €18), a limited edition poster (RRP €18), fridge magnet (RRP €2.50), notebook (RRP €9.95) and postcard pack (RRP €10) all for the great bundle price of €45.

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Tim Robinson – IMMA Art Editions

Author, visual artist, curator, cartographer and mathematician Tim Robinson recently donated his personal archive to IMMA Collections for restoration. To fund this project, two new IMMA  Art Editions have been released just in time for Christmas. One is a colourful exploration of mathematics and palette, the other is a detailed map of an Aran coastline. Robinson is noted for his technical background, having studied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge before practising as a visual artist in Europe. He settled in the Aran Islands off the West Coast of Ireland and became fascinated by the geography and landscape of the islands and the ruggedness of Connemara. Though formally trained in a very specific science, Robinson uses his creative intuition to create pieces that are beautiful and functional.

The above is just but a sample of all the wonderful and whimsical items available at the IMMA Shop. Visit the IMMA Shop on the 1st Floor of IMMA and explore the selection!

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‘Foreign Body’ by Cherry Smyth in response to Jaki Irvine

Cherry Smyth, poet, curator and art writer, is one of the collaborators in Jaki Irvine’s new work If the Ground Should Open…, a major new commission for IMMA presented on the occasion of the centenary of the historic Easter uprisings of 1916. In this blog Smyth discusses her response to Irvine’s work and presents her poem Foreign Body which is performed within the first and eponymous track of Irvine’s new work, currently at IMMA.

A one-off live performance of If the Ground Should Open…, in its entirety, takes place on Tuesday 13 December at 7pm in the atmospheric surrounds of the Great Hall at IMMA, where the footage for the original sound and video work was developed. Cherry Smyth will participate in this live performance alongside the other project performers which include Louise Phelan and Cats Irvine (vocals) ; Sarah Grimes (drums); Jane Hughes (cello); Izumi Kimura (piano); Hilary Knox (bagpipes); Liz McClaren (violin) and Aura Stone (double bass).. Book Tickets €8 euro including post performance reception.


Foreign Body – a poem by Cherry Smyth written for Jaki Irvine, If the Ground Should Open (2016)

When Jaki Irvine asked me to respond to her book Days of Surrender (Copy Press, London, 2015), two things hooked me: the notion of bystanding, inspired by those who claimed to be ‘innocent bystanders’ in Dublin in 1916 and the name Elizabeth O’Farrell, which kept ringing and echoing back as Mairéad Farrell.  Who draws the line of innocence and who chooses to cross it?  I like to think I could have been Elizabeth O’Farrell, risking gunfire in the streets, sacrificing safety and I shudder to think I could have been Mairéad Farrell, an active member of the IRA, jailed for ten years for bombing a hotel and then assassinated by the SAS.  Where does the choice lie?  And how does history choose its heroines?

I had been haunted by Mairéad Farrell’s death since 1988 and knew I could only understand her lack of choice if some part of me became her through a poem.  I wrote about this process more fully in an essay entitled Bystander.

I am interested in how art and poetry can build a space that can hold everything: the collapsed and derided financial system, the failed and deluded electoral system and the ongoing, troubled and troubling project of a united and independent Ireland.  Jaki Irvine’s If the Ground Should Open… creates this kind of space, a space we didn’t know how much we needed until it appeared, a space that has the audacity to put anomalous things together and make a moral resonance.

If the Ground Should Open… presents a big, bleak space, with a mournful coaxing of sound and women’s voices.  The traditional white space around a poem, Irvine juices with music, colours with sound that lifts my poem, Foreign Body, into a new auditory landscape.  This allows others to inhabit the world of the poem in a much fuller and more powerful way.  It is a world of deep (and deepening) frustration with how women’s power and wisdom are dulled, ditched or destroyed by patriarchal culture.

‘The mouth is engineered by gender’ writes Vahni Capildeo in her striking new collection Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet, 2016) and Irvine captures this wonderfully in the phone excerpt of a corrupt, male banker cackling with glee set against visceral female keening.

I write poetry to face the ugliness of contradictions, of moral ambiguity, to stay looking when others have turned away, to inhabit the room they want to evict us from.  Poetry can do what nothing else wants to: call to account, act as a witness.  It relieves the passivity of trauma; it can transform and heal to write what is in front of you.  You are no longer helpless, no longer a bystander.  The vision in your head is outside of you and others can enter it and be held and changed there.

Foreign Body
In 1988, a girl went to Spain.
An Irish girl.  It was March.
Some would say woman.
But she was a girl, a good girl,
to those who knew her.  Clear-eyed, pale.
The mimosa was out.  She rented
a white Ford Fiesta.  A friend gave her a gift.
Carefully wrapped.  She put it in the boot,
parked in a multi-storey carpark.
The friend’s name was Libya.
The girl was 13 in 1970.
Some say it was the platform boots.
Others that it was boots on the ground.
She couldn’t breathe.
The streets were made empty.  She couldn’t
run across her own street.  Boots on the ground.
New platform boots.  Some say it was the CS gas.
She couldn’t see across her street.
The street’s name was the Fall’s Road.
1973 and she liked disco.  The sounds
of Hot Chocolate.  The sounds of binlids
battering the tarmac.  An alerting clatter
to her friends across the street, to hide
their gifts, to move their treasure.
Some say she got in with the wrong crowd,
others that she got an education.  Everyone
with an accent was suspect and everyone
had an accent.  On the streets, a foreign body,
making the local foreign, making who you had
tea with disappear.  That’s 10,000 teacups,
never a judge, never a jury.  Making a schoolgirl
put on a black skirt, a white shirt, a black tie.
It was not a school uniform.  Taking 3000
women and kids to march into the curfew
with bread and milk to break it.
Some say she was walking down a street in Spain
that was a street in Britain.  Some said it in Spanish,
others in English.  The word for ‘prone’ in Spanish
is ‘propenso’.  It was broad daylight, with two friends.
Some said a bad lot.  Some said they had time to look,
put their hands up.  Others that the shooters kept
shooting when they were prone.
The Special Air Service does not deliver air.
Ten years in Armagh, had taught her nothing,
explained everything.  She couldn’t breathe,
wouldn’t wear the uniform.  She wrote with shit,
spoke hunger to the world’s airwaves.
Some called it a war, but she could not be called
a soldier.  Some said she was a criminal, but there
was no trial.  Some called her above the law, but
the execution lawful.  Bare-headed in the spring sun.
Bare-handed on the Spanish-British street, travelling
under a false name that the border control already knew.
A foreign body on a Gibraltar avenue.
i.m. Mairéad Farrell, 1957-1988 (aged 31)

cherry-smyth

Cherry Smyth is a Northern Irish poet and art writer, living in London.  Her first two collections were published by Lagan Press: When the Lights Go Up, 2001 and One Wanted Thing, 2006.  Her third collection Test, Orange, appeared with Pindrop Press, 2012.  Her debut novel, Hold Still, Holland Park Press  came out in 2015. She writes regularly about art for Art Monthly and has written catalogue essays for Elizabeth Magill, Siobhan Hapaska, Brigit McLeer and Orla Barry, among others.  The hallmarks of her work are ‘precision, linguistic inventiveness and joy’, The Irish Times.

If the Ground Should Open… by Jaki Irvine continues at IMMA in the Courtyard Galleries until 15 January 2017. Foreign Bodies is one of eleven tracks which make up the work. Admission to the exhibition is free.

A one-off live performance of the work takes place on Tuesday 13 December at 7pm,. Tickets €8, which includes booking fee and beverages after the performance. Book here.
Watch Jaki Irvine talk about her work in this video introduction to her exhibition.

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Taking part in the Food Power School at A Fair Land

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

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

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

The first day:

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

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

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

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

Day two:

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

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

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

Day three:

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

Day four:

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

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

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

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