0044: Contemporary Irish Artists in Britain

This exhibition, which gathers the work of twenty artists who work in all media, from painting, photography, and sculpture to video and installation, explores the question of identity in a world where mobility is considered the norm. Some of the best contemporary Irish artists now make their homes in England, particularly London. Many leave for the practical advantages of more schooling opportunities and a larger network. These artists, nonetheless, do not consider themselves exiles; many still have galleries in Ireland and travel back and forth frequently. "0044" represents the international telephone code into England, from Ireland. These digits can also be seen to represent the constant communication between places and ideas on the periphery with those at traditional centers of power.

In England, the 0044 artists see themselves working within an international context. They show no interest in being labeled "Irish," despite Ireland's current blossoming, both economically and culturally. By distancing themselves from their native country, these artists escape the confines of what they consider to be an insular society; they also remove themselves from the romantic myths that have shaped Ireland's national consciousness. Each artist's particular ability to address contemporary and universal issues in highly personal ways gives this exhibition a surprising cohesiveness. These artists, acutely aware of the social changes and pressures within Ireland as well as the world at large, have developed a visual language that expresses paradox and truth. This is evident in Paul Seawright's stark but seductive photographs of fires and walls in West Belfast; in the strange beauty of Elizabeth Magill's paintings, which seem to hover on the edge of a void; and in Kathy Prendergast's highly detailed but nameless map drawings of lakes and rivers, which provoke not only a sense of place but also of haunting loss.

Escaping the cultural stereotypes of Ireland while retaining a certain residual sensitivity, the artists in 0044 are uniquely postmodern. They all bring to their diverse projects a sense of the importance of place, but not necessarily a sense of belonging. A deep sensitivity to human feeling and emotion is coupled with a sensibility that instinctively blurs the boundaries between art and everyday life. This creates an immediacy in the work that is analytic rather than romantic, intellectual rather than visceral, reflective rather than angry. Whether their concern specifically focuses on Ireland, or Northern Ireland, or on a new venue altogether, the works mirror many of the world's – and contemporary art’s – most profound questions. As André Stitt says, "My base may be London, but my home, my community is right here inside me wherever I am. As a consequence I feel the work has become more universal."

This exhibition is accompanied by a 175-page catalogue, illustrated in color and black and white, available in the Gallery Shop.

0044: Contemporary Irish Artists in Britain is organized by the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland, and is supported by The Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs; The British Council; An Chomhairle Ealaíon/The Arts Council; Arts Council of Northern Ireland; The Ireland Funds; City of Cork Vocational Education Committee; Port of Cork; The Friends of the Crawford Gallery; Cork Corporation; and Cork County Council.

This exhibition is made possible, in Buffalo, through the generous support of Ballynoe, LLC; William and Laurie Brosnahan; Thomas H. O'Neill, Jr. and Nancy Naples O'Neill; and an anonymous donor.

Cecily Brennan
Cecily Brennan, who has spent the majority of her artistic career as a painter, brings to her sculpture her continued interest in psychological states. Brennan chose to use stainless steel rather than the more traditional materials of wax or bronze because it recalls medical instruments. Concerned with repair as well as protection, she likewise works to undercut Western sculpture's historical obsession with beauty and perfection. Her Hinge-Ons for Bad Days, 1999, draws inspiration not only from self-protecting shin guards but also from associations with domestic samplers and embroidery hoops. Previously an arts organizer and a recent member of the Cultural Relations Committee for the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin, Brennan presently lives and works in London.

Anne Carlisle
Anne Carlisle's work revolves around communication structures. Whether communication refers to one-on-one human interaction or the complex networks of the Internet, Carlisle is interested in the varying ability of these structures to improve human interaction or, alternately, to create greater confusion, something she calls "communication fog." She extends this interest to the differing communication patterns of men and women: how women often work through ideas and concerns by talking with each other while men generally prefer to solve problems in an authoritarian fashion. In addition to being a practicing artist, Carlisle has been a writer, editor, and publisher. She is presently the Head of the Department of Art and Design at University of Wales College, Newport.

John Carson
John Carson has long been concerned with the distinction of being from Ireland as opposed to being an "Irishman." In his performances, videos, photographs, posters, and publications, he mixes social and political commentary with an absurd, but gentle, satirical humor. In the spirit of John Baldessari and Richard Long, Carson wryly investigates popular culture with the serial documentation of an object or idea. For example, in I'd walk from Cork to Larne to see the 40 shades of green, an early work from 1978 that was titled after a famous Johnny Cash song, Carson walked 320 miles across Ireland photographing anything green – cabbages, milk-crates, "go" signs, industrial complexes, railings, a plastic coat, weeds, and military camouflage fatigues – as a means of radically deconstructing the song's dewy-eyed sentiments. With the "Kebabarama" series, 1999, Carson focuses on the international graphic icon for a doner kebab, a block of meat cooked and served on a skewer. Ubiquitous in London, the symbol is as universal and recognizable, in Carson's words, "as the cross, the swastika, or the shamrock." The abstractions of Days, 1998, turn Carson's colorful and untidy professional diaries into a kind of accidental expressionism. As a collaborator and organizer, Carson has directed an arts center, facilitated public projects, and is presently a full-time lecturer at Central Saint Martin's College in London.

Liadin Cooke
Liadin Cooke's work often brings disparate ideas together in her attempt to "take something, re-examine it, and possibly restore it." In 21 balls of clay dug from a field at Closscregg, 1998, she casts hand-molded, unprocessed clay in aluminum, creating silvery, space-age objects that are very much in tune with the late twentieth century. In M---, 1998, she juxtaposes images of an abandoned flat in London with letters (mostly from emigrants or republicans in a Kilkenny prison), to an Irish woman, over a forty-year period. Both works address displacement as one passes through time or space and the wisdom acquired through these passages. Cooke currently lives and works in London.

Maud Cotter
Maud Cotter's interest in transparency began with her work in glass and steel. As a contemporary sculptor who uses a range of materials in unexpected and non-traditional ways, Cotter examines two age-old concerns of art: presence and absence. Attracted to what she calls the "magic of medicine, the saving of bodies, and the saving of souls," her most recent pieces derive inspiration from both human existence and the landscape. A resident at Delfina Studios, London, from 1992 to 1997, Cotter presently lives and works in Cork, Ireland.

Mark Francis
Mark Francis's paintings, inspired by molecules and biological forms, have recently evolved into pure abstraction. His earlier black-and-white imagery referred to various states of equilibrium on both the micro and macro levels. By looking at viruses and the balances within a body's system, for example, Francis found analogies to mapping, societal structures, and the philosophic uncertainty about our existence. For Francis, a fundamental link between man and nature is realized on this structural level. Early on, Francis utilized specific imagery such as the ovum and sperm, but more recently he has turned to abstract color dots to ask more open-ended questions about intimacy and isolation. Francis lives and works in London.

John Gibbons
John Gibbons's large-scale sculptures embrace a range of polarities. They investigate both the body and the spirit and infuse working-class materials, such as steel, with religious overtones. Having worked with large, found, and then collaged steel objects and, most recently, with tiny organic pieces of bronze, Gibbons has consistently occupied himself with existence, both physical and metaphysical. Gibbons has been a professor of sculpture at Winchester School of Art, London, since 1995.

Siobhán Hapaska
Siobhán Hapaska refuses to define her work. A complex play between the technological and the organic, her perfectly polished fiberglass sculptures appear to be timeless while embodying the late twentieth century's obsession with speed. Hapaska is constantly trapping her work between states. For example, Land, 1998, is at the same time figurative and abstract. It reminds one, with its stylized silhouette, of a speeding motorbike and a prehistoric rock formation, worn smooth by millennia of wind and sea. Hapaska has pointed out that the permanent, rooted, romantic sense of place we associate with geological structures is untrue. These structures change, she says, "like everything else, except over a massive time span." Hapaska lives and works in London.

Frances Hegarty
Frances Hegarty has consistently used her own image throughout the twenty-five years spanning her artistic career. In her video work, she has simultaneously been subject and director. She has acted the role of bride, soldier, daughter, archaeological shaman, and subversive British Victorian in a hot pink costume in her quest to deconstruct the stories told about women and Ireland. In Auto Portrait #1, 1999, she successfully confronts the boundaries between personal and cultural histories. Hegarty is currently a professor of fine art at Sheffield Hallam University, in Sheffield, England. Many of her recent projects are collaborations with English artist Andrew Stones.

Andrew Kearney
Andrew Kearney uses space, sound, and light to transport the viewer into a heightened awareness. His high-tech installations often bring information from the outside world to an inside space, where it can be reinterpreted and abstracted. With its stacked shelving and darkened room, Isn't It Normal, 1999, investigates the layering of memory. In the work, Kearney creates a space that feels out of the way, like a basement, with lights that respond to sound. He is interested in evoking memories of being somewhere, not just visually, but sensually. Kearney presently lives and works in London.

Elizabeth MaGill
Elizabeth MaGill's most recent series questions the history and meaning of the traditionally sublime landscape. Rather than comment on the awesome power of nature, MaGill includes the genre alongside her images of industrial gadgetry, baggage-surveillance equipment, and the iconic tableaux that signify the American West. To her, the landscape is not necessarily a place of truth and beauty. Compiled from random, low-quality photographs of London as well as numerous, unknown places, these nightscapes, while containing their own extraordinary splendor, suggest a dark, menacing Irish landscape. MaGill lives and works in London.

Nicholas May
Nicholas May's paintings combine the hyperreal effects of photographs with the brilliance of early Byzantine paintings. Luminescent, painterly investigations, his early works, with their large spaces of high-key color, reference as well the formal and optical concerns of the color-field painters. Although usually untitled, works such as Liminal, 1999, point to his interest in "state[s] of flux... moving from one state to another... I like the fact that the notion of transformation has religious connotations." With their optical buzz, May's most recent bulging "3-D" canvases continue his interest in the psychedelic design of the 1960s and the play on the visual as a metaphor for transformations. May lives and works in London.

Eilís O'Connell
Eilís O'Connell's work bridges the industrial and the organic. She uses a wide range of materials – steel cable, cast resin, bronze, painted steel, gourds, feathers, fiber optics, and steam generators – to create objects that appear at once prehistoric and postmodern. Interested in the poetics of space and a dialogue between form and material, O'Connell draws inspiration from the natural environment, ancient manmade monuments, bits of ephemera collected throughout her travels, the female body, as well as from the purely formal world of abstraction. O'Connell's works range from large public commissions to small, intimate objects. She lives and works in London.

Tina O'Connell
Tina O'Connell's playful installations often transform a gallery space with a range of unusual materials, from strawberry jelly, cheap plastic rafts, and garish red carpeting to mirrored and vacuumed formed domes and self-leveling concrete. She also reconfigures the space by covering a ceiling or floor with protrusions. Using the strategies of minimalist art with its re-examination of space and form, O'Connell asks the viewer to reconsider accepted notions. With Spillage, 1999, she humorously rejects Waterford Crystal, which is considered to be one of Ireland's most precious art forms. O'Connell lives and works in London.

Kathy Prendergast
As a sculptor and draftsman, Kathy Prendergast is a manipulator of eerie proportions. By subtly transforming commonplace objects – maps, bits of clothing, or household objects – Prendergast draws our attention to a range of powerful concerns about identity, political power, and individual experience. For Prendergast, there are no single answers, only constantly shifting states. Thus she considers her work to be always in limbo, between hopefulness and melancholy, the conceptual and the emotional, the body and the landscape, and the humorous and the horrific. In her longest-running project, City Drawings, which began in 1992, Prendergast has continued to draw maps of all the capital cities of the world in delicate pencil. Her task, of course, is utterly impossible as borders shift and nations subdivide. Prendergast's most recent works address life's cycles and passages; her experiments with human hair are unsettling and beautiful, reflecting our desire for continuity. Prendergast lives and works in London.

Paul Seawright
Believing that art can deal with the complex issues that divide Northern Ireland in a more sophisticated and insightful way than that of the news media, Seawright has taken a very personal and intimate look at a range of subjects affecting his native country. These subjects include the Sectarian Murders, the Orange Order, the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary), and the landscape between Belfast's Protestant and Catholic communities. In the Fire and Fence images from his "Belfast" series, 1997, Seawright focused on the no-man's land that exists at the edges of the Protestant and Catholic communities. As a metaphor for Ireland's political position, this no-man's land represents not only destruction but also the possibilities that can emerge from a place filled with, yet cleared of, intense emotional conflict. "It is," he says, "somewhere between the past of Ireland and an uncertain and unknown future." Seawright has also stepped outside of Ireland to photograph the homeless community of Rotterdam and the no-man's land that borders the periphery of Paris to address similarly dark issues on a more global level. He lives and works in Newport, Wales.

André Stitt
André Stitt's installation Substance comprises remnants of his performances that have taken place around the world over the past five years. Addressing questions of power, marginalization, and politics, Stitt's work draws inspiration from a wide variety of sources: the constant remapping of Belfast that he experienced as a youngster, his participation in London's squatting scene, and his experience as a gay man. Inspired by punk music and mail-art networks of the late 1970s and early 1980s in London, Stitt aims to subvert social and cultural containment. Since 1977, Stitt has presented more than 300 unique live performances worldwide. Stitt lives and works in London.

Mo White
Mo White's work investigates the public and the private body. White explains that the work At the Table of Fine Graces, 1999, "is based very loosely on Hans Holbein the Younger's Dead Christ in the Tomb. What I was interested in was how you could read a painting like that – your eyes would go from left to right – and how you would reproduce this in terms of camerawork... What I was hoping was that the complete body that you see would be a public body, and the body in the background involves private gestures, but it's still an active body, a sexualized body – some of the gestures are quite ambiguous. She is also interested in exploring issues of sexuality and gender. White lives and works in Birmingham, England.

work-seth/tallentire
John Seth and Anne Tallentire have been working collaboratively since 1993 as work-seth/tallentire; their shared interest is how to reveal the various and often arbitrary ways that value and meaning are assigned to a work of art and to the world in general. Their questioning of political assumptions is often explored indirectly by looking at the marginal aspects of society. For example, in their performance/video documentary trailer: itinerary, 1999, they set a strict schedule of arbitrary parameters. The schedule required that they traverse Dublin by a route established by a random numerical system each day for ten days. On their journeys, they videotaped marginal details in the morning, edited the footage that afternoon, and then showed the new material at night. Like a security camera that has accidentally been knocked on its side, off its primary focus, the images of trailer deal, as work-seth/tallentire say, "with something that's just below the threshold of articulation, the things we almost don't notice at all as we go about our daily activity. In a sense, what we attempt to articulate is a kind of disjuncture, the reject aspect of any kind of life." Seth and Tallentire are senior lecturers in London at the Canterbury School of Fine Art and Central St. Martin's, respectively.

Daphne Wright
In Daphne Wright's previous installations, the wallpaper and garden hedges of the Irish home appear to come alive. As an examination of Irish domestic life, these spaces were simultaneously seductive and hollow. Made of plaster or tinfoil, their extravagant forms were a spectacle; without color, they were purposely drained of overt emotion. The odd outcroppings in Indeed, Indeed, 1998, are equally deceptive, suggesting both a picturesque rocky landscape and futuristic icebergs. They appear inviting until an audio component reveals the voice of a man saying, "I'm dead." Moving beyond questions of identity, Wright's more recent multilayered narratives consider, as she says, all things "vacillating, shifting, circular." Wright lives and works in Bristol, England.