17 – 31 July 2004 

‘Responding to the land’ is an exhibition of work from the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art which will be shown at Burren College of Art in Co Clare, as part of the college’s 10th anniversary celebrations. The exhibition includes a film work by Irish artist Clare Langan and an installation by American artist Lawrence Weiner.

(…) WATER & SAND + STICKS & STONES (…) by Lawrence Weiner was originally installed in the East Arch of the Royal Hospital in 1993 as part of the exhibition Projects. The work is currently shown in another configuration, on the first floor landing of the Museum in Bearings an exhibition of landscapes from the IMMA Collection and will be exhibited in the Burren College in a similar format. A leading pioneer of Conceptual art in America in the late 60s and early 70s, Weiner’s work is concerned with language and the way meaning is carried in words, signs, symbols and codes. Exhibiting internationally for the past 25 years the artist has made artists’ books, posters, postcards and textual installations.

Clare Langan’s film work, Forty Below, was shot in the bleak landscapes of the Burren in Co Clare and Iceland. Langan stated that she filmed in both these locations because “I’m drawn to barren landscapes more than the wooded areas of Ireland. It was a natural progression to go from Ireland to Iceland as the Icelandic landscape is quite similar to the Burren.” Forty Below depicts a world where the delicate balance has been upturned. There appears to have been a flood and the familiar world is now submerged in water. We see a destroyed world fossilised, frozen in time, the evidence of human life suggested vaguely in a single isolated figure. There is a weightlessness a sense of gravity, where time and place merge, the division between earth and sky become unclear.

The Burren College of Art is internationally recognised as a not-for-profit, independent college specialising in fine art education at undergraduate and graduate level. The College offers artists and students from around the world time, space and inspiration within the unique environment of the Burren.