Satellite Artist Residency
In collaboration with The Mothership Project, from October 21st to December 2nd, 2018 we ran Satellite, an artist residency designed specifically for parenting artists in Ireland. As part of this program, The Mothership Project conducted research into the experience of parenting artists in Ireland that will be used to produce a publication that highlights their needs. Satellite was funded by The Arts Council and Wexford County Council Arts Office and is supported by Visual, Carlow and Wexford Arts Centre.
This pilot programme aims to generate institutional change in how artists are supported throughout their careers and changing family circumstances, as well as contributing to the debate on affordable childcare, precarious work and attitudes to care work. This residency programme for parenting artists highlights the difficulty of maintaining an art career as a parent in Ireland. The Satellite Residency is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and Wexford County Council Arts Office and is supported by Visual, Carlow and Wexford Arts Centre.
About The Mothership:
The Mothership Project is a network of parenting artists in Ireland. The Mothership Project aims to support parenting artists in the development of their practice and to encourage arts organisations to make the art world a more inclusive place for artists with children. Since 2013 The Mothership has hosted workshops and discussions on issues facing parenting artists in Ireland. We have also hosted show & tell events and reading groups around the theoretical underpinnings of this equality and solidarity based project.
Contact: themothershipproject@gmail.com
About the residency:
The Satellite residency programme was designed specifically for parenting artists in Ireland. Through an open call, parenting artists were offered time and space at our studios. Artists were awarded the opportunity to develop new work, progress existing work, or get back to practice after taking time out to have children. ‘Satellite’ offered childcare, accommodation, a stipend and a variety of time slots to artists who were looking to take time out to focus on their practice. The residencies were tailored to the needs of the artist and their family, allocating time slots as short as three and as long as ten days.
Week 1: Kate Warner & James Ó hAodha
Kate Warner
Kate Warner grew up in Co. Wicklow and lived in Dublin before moving to London. She studied painting at NCAD and then the Royal College of Art (London). Solo exhibitions include Cross Gallery, Dublin, and Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray. She participated in the Unbuilding Project (2010), a collaborative group of artists and curators, supported by Wicklow County Council and the Arts Council of Ireland. Other group shows include recent exhibitions in London and Kent. In 2017, Kate designed and facilitated a workshop at Tate Exchange, as part of ‘Occupation’, an exhibition and seminar on Art Education in collaboration with UCL Institute of Education and Freelands Foundation.
Warner’s statement reads, “I use painting to explore ideas around environment and to investigate relationships in my physical and narrative surroundings. Some of my past work has come from the idea of moving through a landscape, disorientation and investigation. I try to bring an improvised and responsive approach to my work, which develops through the process of making it. Recent work has played with the idea of materials crossing between studio, exterior and domestic space, emerging in their different contexts in humorous, hidden or insistent ways.”
James Ó hAodha
James Ó hAodha [O-Hay] (b. 1985, Wexford) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Manchester. Graduating in Sculpture from NCAD in 2009, Ó hAodha has continued to develop a socially engaged practice, working for the most part beyond the bounds of the exhibition space. Most recently, he completed the MFA program at Glasgow School of Art, pursuing ongoing interests in performance and video work and exploring the physical agency of the moving-image.
Ó hAodha’s work is invested in the creation of encounters; formally, this can include performance, intervention and exchange – with a shared focus on how temporal encounters can inhabit and intersect with the space of the gallery. Recent work explores the potential of theatrical setting and lighting, and delves into dramatic trope and gesture and their insinuation in various media.
Ó hAodha was awarded the 2015 Dublin City Council Visual Art Bursary and has been involved in projects with Dublin’s Culture Connects; Hugh Lane Gallery; NCAD Gallery; The Lab, Dublin; Dublin City Council; Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray; Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff; and TULCA, Galway, amongst others.
Week 2: Celina Muldoon & Niamh O’Doherty
Celina Muldoon
Celina Muldoon (b.1980) is an Artist based in North West Ireland. Graduating with a First Class Honours degree in Fine Art, I.T. Sligo in 2014, her work was purchased for their permanent collection. Muldoon completed an MFA in Sculpture from N.C.A.D. in 2016. She was a member of Jesse Jones NO MORE FUN AND GAMES (2016) feminist collective and Amanda Coogan’s I’ll sing you a song from around the town 2015. Her graduate work We are in cahoots…You and I was selected for Mobius(Boston) international performance festival, 2017 and Craw festival Berlin, 2018. Muldoon has completed residencies in MART and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. She has exhibited in Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, The Complex, Waveparticle and Celine gallery, Glasgow and Project Arts Centre Dublin. She has been awarded the Next Generation Bursary award, The Artist in the Community scheme award and a residency in Cow House Studios in partnership with The Mothership Project this November.
Identity, memory and surveillance are themes around which I investigate relationships between socio-political structures and the body. Rooted in performance, my practice spans live work, documentation of its products and traces and the representation of these in other forms.
Gender, abjection and ritual are motif’s embedded within my exquisitely adorned Alter Egos. Mischievously they toy with domestic role-playing through the re-enactment of mythological narratives. Critical triggers of my live work rely on audience participation and interaction. Audio and live installation elements work in tandem to manifest highly charged experiences unfolding momentarily in real time.
By creating narrative threads that link art-making to site and context, I strive to interrogate ways in which live art acts as a catalyst in response to and infiltration of political, social and public spheres. This includes the exploration of nuanced expressions of the body as an agency in relation to historic and contemporary changes in our national and cultural identity.
Niamh O’Doherty
Born, Donegal, Ireland, 1988, Niamh O’Doherty is a visual artist based in Dublin. O’Doherty received her BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2010 and her MA in Art in the Contemporary World, NCAD, in 2014. Solo exhibitions include “Standing at the Still Point” Linnenhall Art Centre, Castlebar, Co. Mayo in 2017 and “Reflections on Time” at Broadstone Studios (2014).
Probing notions and perceptions of time through my work, I aim to highlight how our perception of time shapes our society. I use a diverse range of materials in my work, inducing film, photography, drawing, watercolour painting, printmaking techniques and found objects. The materials used in the practice are determined by an iterative conceptual process.
Week 3: Una Quigley & Susan Montgomery
Una Quigley
Born in Dublin, Úna Quigley graduated from Crawford College of Art, Cork and Winchester School of Art, Spain & U.K. in 2001 with an MA in European Fine Art. She has since exhibited widely such as at the Kassel Film Festival, the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Centrum Berlin, Project Arts Centre, Ireland, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Ireland, and Crawford Gallery, Ireland.
In recent years she screened her film work at the National Film Archive in Seoul and Berliner Liste, had a solo exhibition The Interval at Centrum Berlin and co-created a cinema in the wilderness for a temporary project entitled Wild-screen in Connemara. She exhibited in Tulca The Headless City in 2016 and is premiering new work at the Istanbul Experimental film festival in 2018.
Quigley has been included in a number of publications, such as Cooling out – on the paradox of Feminism by Lewis Glucksman Gallery/Kunsthaus Baselland, and recently False Optimism published by Crawford Gallery Ireland and All Mountains begin on the Ground, an artists book of essays.
She has received awards from local authorities, Culture Ireland, the Arts Council of Ireland, and Ealaín na Gaeltachta and was most recently awarded an Artists Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2017.
My work explores the body as a place of resistance, and the interstice between the domestic and the public sphere. I try to use film to explore situations that go beyond the surface to tap into the energy of bodies that clash with their surroundings. I use absurdity as a strategy in performance and film structure to create affective meaning.
I am interested in the capacity of maternal ethics and aesthetics to unsettle or queer modes of subjectivity that are grounded in individualism. The cut, and the interstice – the juxtaposition of the film image – are central conceptual figures in my practice.
birdsofmyweakness.blogspot.com
Susan Montgomery
Susan Montgomery is a visual artist from Wicklow and has lived in West Cork since 2007. She graduated from DLIATD in 1997. Her extensive exhibition record includes Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Doswell Gallery, Rosscarbery, Cross Gallery, Dublin, The Joinery, Dublin, Signal Arts Centre, Bray, Talbot gallery, Dublin and Greyfriars Municipal Gallery, Waterford.
Montgomery is a member of the experimental collective Tellurometer Project; recipient of a Wicklow County Council Award to fund a publication currently in progress. Additionally, educational work at West Cork Arts Centre since 2009 resulted in commissioned work and public engagement touring to Mermaid Arts Centre, Highlands Gallery and Wexford Arts Centre to accompany Mikala Dwyer’s Panto Collapsar. Other educational awards include a Cork County Council Commission by the County Library Service in 2015.
Susan Montgomery’s work belongs in the collections of OPW, Trinity College, Dublin, former First National Bank, The Ice Hotel, Ballina, Touchstone Healthcare and Waterford County Council.
My work is influenced by the landscape. It encompasses the mediums of painting, drawing, installation and assemblage. It is a process-based practice that explores the materiality of paint as well as the manipulation of found surfaces and objects, often centred on the behaviour of chance marks, stains and arrangements, The results are works that describe a dialogue between the carefully chosen tools, media and surfaces I use to explore these processes, the poetics of which express her involvement with the human experience and its relationship with the landscape.
Week 4: Stephen Dunne & Niamh Davis
Stephen Dunne
Stephen Dunne’s work operates across the registers of painting, drawing and moving image. Works are produced in a spontaneous manner and attempt to draw upon the unconscious as a source material. The process of making, where each thing leads to the next through an experimental and intuitive approach is at the core of this work.
Dunne is a graduate of the M.A in Fine Art painting at the Royal College of Art and of NCAD and his recent exhibitions include “As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics” & “Wilder Beings Command” at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Forthcoming solo presentations will be at the Ashford Gallery at RHA in February, Triskel Arts, Cork in April and the Courthouse, Ennistymon Co.Clare, May 2019.
Niamh Davis
Niamh Davis is a Dublin based artist. She has a BFA from Crawford Art College, Cork and a Post Grad from UCD. She has had solo exhibitions in Cross Gallery, Dublin, nag Gallery, Dublin, PS2, Belfast and The Andrew Stone Gallery, Westport, as well as many group exhibitions throughout Ireland, Berlin and Timor Leste. In addition to the Mothership Project Satellite Residency in Cow House Studios, awards include Fire Station Artist’s Studio’s Digital Media Residency Award and the Backwater Artists Studio’s, Ciaran Langford Memorial Bursary Award.
Niamh’s work is motivated by a desire to explore and to excavate meaning from our contemporary condition and what it means to be a woman in 21st Century Ireland.
Her most recent work includes short minimal vignettes based purely on an encounter between herself and the camera. In this situation, artistic production is reduced to it’s barest form yet using Green Screen technique and high-end video production. A series of personas act out jovial expressions pushed to an extreme, externalising inner states and giving form to contradiction.
Week 5: Ciara McMahon, Sally O’Dowd & Dorota Borowa
Ciara McMahon
Ciara McMahon is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes site-specific performative installations, paint, and video. McMahon has an MA from the combined pathway ACW program (thesis First) NCAD and a BA (First) from NCAD. She is currently enrolled in the Turps Banana Correspondance Course 2018- 2019.
McMahon’s has had solo exhibitions in The Banff Center; NCAD Gallery; the Joinery. Further shows include the Garter Lane Arts Center; Bath Royal Science and Literacy Institution; Birkbeck College, London; Pallas Projects; Annual RUA Exhibition and TULCA amongst others. McMahon has been awarded Audrey E. Klinck scholarship at the Banff Arts Centre; Artist in the Community Award Phase 1 and 2 from CREATE; Arts Council Travel and Training Award and DLR arts grants.
McMahon’s practice is preoccupied with the play of embodiment between Self / NonSelf, and how this is experienced both in private or within the wider socio-political society. In her current body of work, McMahon is attending to Objects, specifically whether it is possible to do a portrait of an Object? : An Aga, a set of ceramic cats, a toilet, a doorknob. “The other portrait is at the same time the other within, hidden in the portrait, inaccessible to the portrait, and the other, different portrait that can no longer resemble one” Jean-Luc Nancy, 2013
Sally O’Dowd
Sally O’Dowd is a visual artist with a socially engaged practice focusing on drawing and performance. As a politically aware artist, her research is concerned with identity and in particular intimate female ritual and investigating the role – self-selected and enforced – of women in contemporary Irish society. Her artwork also focuses on authenticity in documentation by way of performance, film and drawing. She creates often absurd, socially awkward performance, in which costumes and props amount to an abject beauty.
O’Dowd is a studio member of Vault Artist Studios, Belfast, and a founding Director of Townhall Cavan Arts Space.
Dorota Borowa
Dorota Borowa is a Polish artist based in Dublin. She received her MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Dorota has exhibited both in Ireland and abroad (e.g. Eight Gallery, Dublin, Ormond Studios, Dublin, m² Gallery, Warsaw, Platan Gallery, Budapest) and has been awarded a number of residency programmes. To date, Borowa has received two scholarships from the Polish Ministry of Culture. In 2016 she was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize. Her work has recently been selected for the second issue of Bloomers Magazine. Borowa’s work was also recently featured in the film ‘Monument’ by award-winning Polish director Jagoda Szelc. Dorota collaborates with m² Gallery in Warsaw.
“By not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of nature (or a readymade) always posses.” -Gerhard Richter
Dorota works across a range of media including painting, printmaking, video and photography. All Dorota’s recent works are painted in partnership with the elements. The aim is to capture traces of the patterns which nature leaves in its path. Her paintings are the consequence of the reactions which are unleashed when mixing water and oil paints with chemical reactions separating the pigments. She does not have a preconceived image and this freedom allows her to accept the way the paint flows or to impose her own will. Her works become a place between accident and design, between acceptance and destruction.
Week 6: Sarah Lincoln, Ruby Wallis, Linda Quinlan & Ruth Lyons
Sarah Lincoln
Sarah Lincoln (born in 1980) is a visual artist based in Ardmore, Co. Waterford. She graduated from NCAD in 2004 with a joint degree in Fine Art and the History of Art. She holds an MA in Visual Arts Practice from IADT. Sarah writes for Enclave Review and Critique.
Her work has been included in Claremorris Open, EVA and as part of numerous group exhibitions. The Irish Arts Council, Create and ArtLinks have supported her practice.
Sarah Lincoln uses drawing, moving-image, clay and participatory approaches to explore complexities bound up in the landscape. Her practice is inspired by sources which oscillate between local material remains and abstract/ global phenomena. The pace of change suggested by forces like evolution and plate tectonics are a creative influence. In stretching to speak between the local and the abstract her work often relies upon techniques associated with collage.
Ruby Wallis
Ruby Wallis is an artist and lecturer who completed her PhD at The National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2015. She was an artist in residence at The Irish Museum of Modern Art (2016) and received an Arts Council’s Bursary Award (2017). She was awarded the first prize at Claremorris Open Exhibition and was nominated for the Prix Pictet Photography (2013). She lectures at The Burren College of Art and the National University of Ireland.
Recent exhibitions include Art of Protest, GIAF (2018) Material Conditions, Platform Arts, Belfast (2018) Engage, The Gallery of Photography, Dublin (2017) Post-picturesque Ireland, Perlman Teaching Museum, Minnesota (2017). New Century Retro, Claremorris Open Exhibition (2016). Contact, Belfast Exposed Gallery (2016). BX Futures, Centre Culturel Irlandais (2015), Contact, Belfast Exposed Gallery (2015).
Her work is held in the Rochester Art Centre collection, Minnesota and the National University of Ireland, Galway.
I’ve been engaged in the process of photography in an increasingly performative sense, recently, returning to the body and a gendered experience of landscape. Reflecting on how traditionally an experience of the ‘sublime’ in art history has been from a male perspective.
For this series, I’m using the image to interrogate and record experiences of place, not a particular site but an imagined place. Examining the idea of horizon lines, outer edges, precipices, boundaries, periphery spaces. My aim is to incorporate a sense of touch in close-ups and embedded on-site views. Instead of adopting the traditional distant view I’ve been using the close up to highlight tactile surfaces and substances, natural or synthetic, organic or structured. I’m interested in photography and its potential to convey personal and often subjective experiences. Using embroidery as a reference to the domestic sphere and the stitch as a subversive act.
Linda Quinlan
Linda Quinlan is a graduate of the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, NCAD, Dublin and Crawford College, Cork.
She has exhibited at Oakville Galleries, Toronto; Bloomberg Space, London; CRAC Alsace, Altkirch; Smart Project Space, Amsterdam; IMMA, Dublin; Loop Gallery, Seoul; Salon Populaire, Berlin; Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Crawford Gallery, Cork; RHA, Dublin; Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin and Glucksman Gallery, Cork. Residencies include The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; Picture This, Bristol; IMMA, Dublin, TBG&S, Dublin, University of Tasmania, Hobart and Fondazione Ratti, Como.
She has received awards from the Arts Council, Culture Ireland, Dublin City Council, Dutch Ministry and the Fire Station Artists’ Studios. She was awarded the AIB Prize and is in the collection of IMMA and the Arts Council. She is currently on the board of MExIndex.
Linda Quinlan’s interdisciplinary practice presents as a kind of visual alchemy, choreographing a playful set of relations between video, object and sound. The gentle poetry between language, the body and the natural world are central to her practice, how they touch and transfer forms the mesh from which she makes much of her work. It’s a practice that consistently circles back to a conversation about connectivity and exploring the relational aspects of our reality – how we live, how we come together, where we look for meaning. Her recent work is grounded in the activity of painting, developing a vibrant lexicon of imagery that captures an ecological and civic spirit and engages the subject of love, nature, survival and the feminine.
Ruth Lyons
Ruth E Lyons is based in Co. Offaly, Ireland. Over the past years, she has created works in the sky (Sky is the Limit, 2012, public commission for Scoil Naomh Eoin, Co. Meath), the sea (Pinking on Sea, 2014, Kinsale Arts Festival) and underground (Salarium 230million BCE – 2023 CE commission with EUSalt Assoc.)
Recent exhibitions include The Necessity of Art, Grazer Kunstverein Summer Programme, Austria, 2017, Forecast of the Next Century, 2016, Broad Art Museum, Michigan, Riddle of the Burial Grounds, 2016, Extra City, Antwerp and Follies of Youth, 2015, Hepworth Wakefield Gallery, Yorkshire. Her work is included in OPW collection. Lyons is currently working on Salarium 230million BCE – 2023 CE an exploration of Zechstein Sea, a 230 million-year-old salt seam that underpins Northern Europe, with EUSalt Assoc. and a first permanent public commission for Coláiste Raithín, Bray, Co. Wicklow. Upcoming exhibitions include Shaping Ireland, group show, National Gallery of Ireland April- July 2019 and Borderlines, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh March- July 2019
My work is concerned with landscape and deep time. I am fascinated by the spectrum of human engagement with landscape throughout history and the incredible forms this has resulted in from megalithic monuments to the underground cavities of contemporary mines.
My work originates from an experience of landscape and a consideration of human engagement within it from an anthropological perspective, always questioning what constructed forms, whether functional or abstract say about the spiritual dimension of a people.
I work primarily in large-scale sculpture and am particularly passionate about the creation of public works that intervene in the development and evolution of landscapes. I am interested in developing works that reach new and incidental audiences and that can endure and resonate over time.
