Locale 3 | The Artists – TO EE EDITED

LEIGH ARTHUR
I will tell my grandchildren about my struggles as comic relief for their own
Paint

A fragmented landscape based on a view toward Phibsborough from Broadstone in 2018 before the Abortion referendum. The electricity pole has a ‘Need Abortion Ireland’ information sticker. There is a Deliveroo cyclist, a bus driver finishing his shift and an Ikea worker going to work, yet on a nearby billboard a woman in lingerie straddles a man in a suit. Countess Markievicz rolls in her grave. It is a busy intersection, as well as my walk home and at night, an unsafe place. We live, we work, we resist. Now in 2019 I revisit this point and imagine our uncertain future. 

Multidisciplinary artist Leigh Arthur has been working as a professional animator since 2012 after graduating from BA (Hons) in Animation from IADT.  She has collaborated as a musician and artist through a number of projects including music videos, poster design, documentary photography and live performance from local DIY spaces to venues such as IMMA, The Model, The Douglas Hyde and The Scala in London. 

Leigh is currently working on new series of paintings and life drawings, as well as a photography book documenting the life of a former autonomous DIY punk space in Dublin.

Instagram: @LeighxArthur
Email: LeighxArthur@gmail.com

CLAIRE BURKE
The Neighbourhood of a Pixel
Video

This piece considers the relationship between nature, technology and humanity.

A fragmented landscape is to be found all around us and is, familiar to anyone that lives in an urban, and technologically enhanced, environment. The glitched landscape is now part of our urban experience as our senses are assaulted by a constant flow of pixels. Our natural environment becomes unrecognisable as it slowly declines and disappears into the digital hyper real.

Claire’s practice explores the interdisciplinary area of art and technology. Her research explores computational creativity and new aesthetics within contemporary art. A graduate of the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Claire holds HCert in Audio Visual Media Technology, BEng in Digital Media Technology and BA in Visual Arts Practice. She holds an MA Art in the Contemporary World from the National College of Art and Design.

Claire is an author and contributor to Digicult, representing an international network of selected educators, journalists, curators, artists, theorists, practitioners and critics with a track record of research, academic and professional practice in the fields of contemporary digital arts, design and culture.

www.claireburke.net
Email: Claire.burke66@gmail.com

CLAUDINE CHEN & DANIEL BRENNAN
Taking a fish for a walk
Film

Taking a fish for a walk is a video piece exploring the underside of the Royal Canal.

Formerly a physicist and research scientist, Claudine Chen likes to play at the intersection of art, science, hardware and software.

Danny Brennan primarily is a writer and film maker. He works with Irish history and myth and the ghosties that dwell in it. His work has been screened at the Galway Film Fleadh and Cannes Film festival. Danny also makes new media artworks like data moshed archive films as well as old media art works like getting a load of people in a room and tricking them into enjoying live performances in strange environments or theatre.

www.mingness.github.io
Email: cloudnine@gmail.com
Daniel Brennan
Email: danjpjlb@gmail.com

SIOBHÁN CLANCY
Knowledge is Heavy II
Performance/Mixed Media

In 2009, as artist-in-residence at the National Council for the Blind of Ireland/NCBI Siobhán Clancy worked in collaboration with visually impaired service users and sound artist Sven Anderson to produce ‘Ear Canal’. This audio artwork was produced using recordings gathered on a two day excursion by barge along the Royal Canal together. It was shown at an exhibition later that year entitled ‘Escape into Sound’.

Now 10 years on, Siobhán has reconnected with current staff and service users of NCBI. A short video documentary of the making of ‘Ear Canal’, narrated by one of the participants Lorraine Donegan, features in Locale 3. In addition, as part of her ongoing, touring project ‘Where is our Feminist Library?’ Siobhán presents ‘Knowledge is Heavy II’ a public engagement programme in collaboration with A4 Sounds Studio. The programme includes an audio described tour of the Locale 3 exhibition by artist and trained guide Fala Buggy. Materials donated by the participating artists are presented by Siobhán as a ‘materials library’ for handling by exhibition visitors.

Special thanks to A4 Sounds Studio, guide Fala Buggy, librarian consultant Tom Maher and staff and service users both past and present at the National Council for the Blind of Ireland.

Siobhán Clancy is a visual artist concerned with social health. Her practice is located in institutional, civic and cultural spaces. She often collaborates with other artists, activists, youth, community and wom*n’s groups. The outcomes typically materialise as multi-media works, immersive events, participatory performances, dialogues, play and live action in contexts of health, education and justice.

In 2019, Siobhán piloted ‘wHere is Our Feminist Library?’ a public engagement project that collaborates with feminist initiatives to produce bespoke programmes. Her first project ‘Seeding’ for the Spare Room Project in Cork City (www.spareroomproject.ie) involved the creation of a seed bank in the vault of a former financial bank. See @FemLibrIreland.

Siobhán is the first Green Artist in Residence at Cork University Hospital, the only hospital in the world to achieve Green Flag status. She is the Creative Associate for the Helium Arts Health Hub in Cork and provides art consultation to Make Create Innovate, an ed-tech start up in Dublin as well as other arts organisations and cultural institutions around Ireland.

Email: siobhanclancy@gmail.com
Twitter: @FemLibrIreland

NIAMH COFFEY
Untangling
Illustration

In 2017, Niamh Coffey was part of the Dublin Canvas project. Her work, ‘Tongue- Tied’,  was painted on the traffic-light control box at Dorset Street Lower. It was an image of two people kissing, their tongues getting merged together, and their subsequent attempts to separate themselves. It was there for two years and a few weeks ago it was painted over with a new design. 

The work shown in Locale#3 takes the subjects from the box and explores the idea of them existing outside of it, engaging in their environment in absurd and frantic ways. Instead of being trapped under a new coat of paint, it is as though the subjects have simply peeled themselves off the box and have had some new adventures around the Dorset Street area and specifically, with the wildlife of the Royal Canal.

The work captures these exploits through the form of three narrative panels. The images are made from cut out paint and have the same glossy, tactile materiality and colour palette of the electricity box the work used as a starting point.

Niamh Coffey is a Dublin-based artist from Laois. She graduated from NCAD in 2016 with a honours degree in Sculpture and Expanded Practices and a highly commended thesis titled ‘Through the telescope, under the microscope: Sarah Sze’. Recent exhibitions her work has featured in include ‘Thinking about Blue Almonds’, an Ormond Art Studios group show, ‘Body/Battleground’ in A4 Sounds and ‘Awkward Interjection’ at Pallas Project/Studios . She has previously been a member of Ormond Studios and Blackchurch print studios and has recently become a member of A4 Sounds.

Niamh Coffey
Email: nkcoffey@gmail.com
Instagram: @niamhnomilktwosugars

ANGELA CUTHILL
Doicemead
Illustration / Book

‘It grew from a cleft of rock in St. John’s wood, Wanganui, it is not a creeper as its appearance would indicate…’

The Royal Canal terminates at Broadstone.  One branch to Longford and the other into the Liffey: an intermediary channel into the rest of the world.  The first part of a journey from Cork to Wellington, recording botanical traces and fragments, never going back.

This imagined journal completes the botanical documentation for one woman, in the years 1839-1840, as part of her navigation into the new world.

Angela Cuthill, B.A (Ceramics), Master of Arts Admin. is a Dublin based artist, originally from Tasmania, who has most recently been working in sculpture and illustration.

With a strong interest in colour and pattern, Angela draws inspiration from the natural environment, contrasting materials and textures in her work to create vivid flora and fauna inspired work. Passionate about drawing from life, most recent work of continues the exploration of scale and juxtaposition of colour and texture to create imagined environments.

www.AngelaCuthill.com
Email: info@AngelaCuthilldesign.com
Instagram: @AngelaCuthill

SARAH DEVEREUX
Portrait of the artist as a Himalayan Salt Lamp
Paint

I want to be a Himalayan Salt Lamp,
I want to make you feel at ease,
I want to make me feel at ease,
I want the automatic calmness
and to rosey glow.
Sure, I’ll ionize the air for you…whatever the fuck that means.
I NEED to be a Himalayan Salt Lamp,
IS THERE A SURGERY FOR THIS?
I will pay big bucks to get this autocalm (automatic calmness)
DO YOU KNOW HOW TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN?!
I NEED IT.
I’ll trade you my blood and organs if you can turn me into this.
A fair trade I think.
(But….they can still crumble, have you ever seen one in a damp room THEY’RE NOT OK! GET THEM
AWAY FROM THE WALLS AT ONCE!!!)
(Shush now, don’t think that way, just look at them go!
Look at them glow!
You’ll grow up to make a fine lamp one day.)
Oh,
Is there anything I can do?
It’s what I’m aiming for, if I could just be a Himalayan Salt Lamp for one night,
then things might be alright.
Wham bam thank you ma’am I need automatic calm
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
When I think about the word locale,I think about community.
When I think about the word community, I think about A4 Sounds.
When I think about A4 Sounds, I think about connection.
And the sense of ease I feel within myself being here.
It’s automatic.
It’s not all the time, nothin’ is magic.
But many times, it’s where I feel the most me and the most ok. It’s the closest to achieving being a
Himalyan Salt Lamp I have gotten to.
With the help of studio members and GGs (gallery goers) I hope to completly turn into a himalyan salt
lamp for one night only.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Sarah Devereux cartwheels over, dances on, and kicks dust at the line separating Art & Life, and this often induces anxiety and fear! Working in a wide range of disciplines including drawing, sculpture, paint, performance and video, her work could be described as extreme honesty dressed up in glitter. Her sculptures and drawings are crude but intelligent, disturbing but endearing, ‘fabulous’ but anxious, and immediate but considered. Her performance work moves between traditional performance art, video art, interventions and cabaret. her work is explicitly political, and often tackles themes of female body autonomy, lack of opportunities caused by the recession, boredom and fear, whilst remaining playful, absurd and accessible.

www.cargocollective.com/sarahdevereux
Email: thedirtbird1@gmail.com
Instagram: @thedirtbird

AIDEEN FARRELL
Untitled
Installation / Sculpture

This work is part of an ongoing focus on a stretch of the Royal Canal from Ashtown through Cabra, where Aideen lives and commutes. The work comes from drawings of the segments, fences, locks, areas undergoing rapid development, and the partly disused industrial areas that lie on this route. Aideen is interested in planning, control, and disconnection within these spaces. She wants to capture pieces of our environment at various levels of solidity and order. Aspects of private living spaces are imagined merging into shifting segments of the canal and its immediate environs. Static models become activated within unsteady structures, and temporary forms and soft materials merge and leave traces in the more solid.

Aideen Farrell is a Dublin-based installation artist. She explores the systems and physical structures that shape, represent, and impose order on our built environments.  She uses drawing, casts, projections, and makeshift structures to create navigable installations. Her work weighs the polished, fixed designs of architecture and urban planning against underlying conditions of precarity and collapse.

Aideen graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 2017 with a BA in Fine Art Painting and Visual Culture. On graduating, she received the Fire Station Graduate Sculpture Award, was highly commended in the Undergraduate Awards for her degree show work. She was awarded development of the work funding from Fingal Arts Office in 2018 and 2019 and undertook a Dublin City arts office residency at St Patrick’s Lodge in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include Showroom in Linenhall Arts Centre and A Weight of Windows at Pallas Projects.

www.aideenfarrellartist.com
Email: AideenFarrell9@gmail.com
Instagram: @AideenFarrellArt

HEATHER GRAY
Made to last
Illustration / Installation

Made to Last is a look at some of the decorative infrastructure which was installed in the 19th & 20th centuries in our locale. In a time before planned obsolescence (products having a designed life expectancy) these items were designed not only to be functional but to be permanent decorative features of the city. Are these coal hole covers and ornate lamp posts symbols of a more permanent mindset from this era compared to our own?

The lamp posts are the feature of many a tourist’s Instagram photo and Dublin City Council recently announced that they will be installing replicas of the original ornate lamp posts in certain areas of Dublin. As for the coal holes, many are still in good condition while some have worn away to a smooth iron surface. Others have been stolen, either being replaced with newer, less decorative designs, or just left empty.

Heather Gray is an artist with an interest in drawing, sculpture and installation. Her work is concerned with nature, reality and artificiality. Heather runs ArtMaker Dublin which provides art classes and workshops to the public.

http://www.cargocollective.com/heathergray
Email: HeatherGray.art@gmail.com
Instagram: @ArtMaker_Dublin

YU
Spectacular Elixir
Performance

Performance Time:
Thurday 24th 9pm
Findlater Pub
Upper Dorset Street
Dublin 1

Inspired by the writings of Jacques Ranciere’s musings in ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, this ongoing research project is an investigation into the highly performative nature of labour inherent within the service industry. Yu is exploring how our assigned roles within the mechanics of a restaurant can potentially chip away at our sense of self and how certain performances can begin to abstract us from ourselves and each other. The study of the theatrics that are performed to uphold the ‘romance’ or alluring facade of a restaurant/bar is the foundation to this work. Additionally, this project is foregrounding the assertion that exploitation under capitalism functions and replicates due to the obscuring of its evidence. The critique of facades, masks and decorative structures that combine to conceal systems of toil will be an essential framework throughout the making of this project.

This particular rendition of Yu’s ongoing research project will take form as a performance piece. Throughout the live work, verbal and embodied investigations into the ethics of Performer and Spectator within a hospitality environment and the ways in which this kind of labour is observed and consumed will be called into question.  

Yu is an art-worker currently based in Dublin and explores the limitations, inhibitions and equally, the radical possibilities of human communication, resistance and joy in light of social disorder/oppressive order. The exploration of an alienated, disjointed existence brought about by highly performative labour underpins the critical foundation of their work. This ongoing research is currently funded by the Arts Council Artist in the Community Scheme, managed by Create.

www.gigrecruitmentinc.com
Email: YurikaHigashikawa@gmail.com 

GARRETH JOYCE
Ramp
Graphic Art

Ramp emerges from ripped billboards and posters. Joyce finds his inspiration on the street, images faded and layered upon each other to create new narratives. The layered figures exist together but the tension is distinct. The self-battles the self for power. Faces light up in intense blazing orange.  The energy from the figures is tangible and the rips look like bold aggressive brush strokes adding to the drama of the work.

Garreth Joyce (b.1980, Cork like) is a Graphic Artist based in Dublin, Ireland. Garreth utilises his background in design, illustration and photography to create his work. Using metaphor and symbol in a collaged style, unrelated images are juxtaposed with one another to create new meaning and unexpected results. Although unrelated, the images often flow together pictorially. Garreth has a process of translating his art to large scale murals using multi-layered hand cut stencils and mark making. He has developed art works and murals for various community projects, commissions and brands.

Email: gwjoyce@gmail.com

RÓISÍN MCGANNON
I Hear Crepidations
Photography

This work acts as a research aid investigating the ideas surrounding walking and coping mechanisms that can arise through the act of walking under physical stress. This work is the basis of new ideas being investigated during time spent in Loughshinny Boathouse as part of an awarded Residency supported by Fingal Arts Council.

Róisín McGannon is a Visual Artist based in Dublin. Since graduating from NCAD with a BA Hons First Class in Fine Art Printmaking she had her first solo show ‘How it Stands, Provisionally’ in A4 Sounds Gallery in early 2019. She has completed residencies in Block T supported by Fingal Arts and the inaugural residency in Eoin Moylan Studio, Berlin. She has exhibited in the RHA 188th Annual Exhibition Dublin, and gone onto show work in Amsterdam, Cork and Kerry.

Her work is concerned with the unreliable and uncertain position of being in the body; when your anchorage to the world is unhinged. Through multidisciplinary media she investigates the difference between the functional and the dysfunctional, both physically and emotionally, then in turn obscures and highlights expectation and capability.

www.roisinmcgannon.com
Email: roisinmcgannon@gmail.com
Instagram: @RoisinMcgannon

LIESELLE MCMAHON
Unprotected
Sculpture

This new work is suspended in the vulnerable, boundary-less, violable space where trust, consent, joy and fear coexist and interact in human intimacy. 

Lieselle McMahon is a visual artist living in Dublin, where she studied Music & Media Technologies at TCD and Visual Art at NCAD. Her practice is mainly sculptural, encompassing 2D, 3D installation, live art and sound sculpture. Drawing on the assertion that the personal is political, conceptual themes around feminism and anti-capitalism manifest themselves in her work.

Email: liesellemcm@gmail.com, 
Facebook: @lieselle.mcmahon

LEIA MOCAN
Beat
Sculpture, Photography, Video

This body of work is exploring the relationship between the Irish Healthcare system and the Catholic church, the largest non-governmental provider of health care services in the world. Here, the intersecting points are dissected to reveal how the religious ethos governing these state-run, private and voluntary hospitals affects the patients wellbeing and limits their free will.            

BEAT was designed to incorporate only upcycled / recycled materials, creating a 100% environmentally friendly and sustainable body of work. The physical narrative provides a visual statement about the engine of global consumption, focusing on the destructive human behavior and the need of shifting the negative trajectories of human legacy focusing on our healing process, both from a physical and spiritual perspective.

Originally from Romania, Leia is a Dublin based multimedia artist working in the mediums of Photography, Sculpture, Art Installation, Art Performance and Painting focusing  on themes related to the environment. She  studied oil painting (2002- 2006) and now she is  a recent graduate (2019) of Griffith College where she earned a BA in Visual Arts, Photography. She is the winner of  “New Voices of Ireland ” bursary award program series 7, sponsored by the Arts Council and Participatory Arts . Leia’s work was featured in the group exhibition “Cultural memory, transition, temporality” included in the “Culture Night Festival 2019”.

www.leiamocan.com
Email: Contact@LeiaMocan.com
Instagram: @MocanLeia
Facebook: LeiaMocan

VIVIENNE MOLLOY
Local
Illustration, Beading, Embroidery

As the Royal Canal has been a source of inspiration for many people, Vivienne decided to use it as her starting point. Vivienne visited the canal and was instantly inspired by the movement and colours reflecting on the water. For this piece she wanted to try and capture the essence of the canal through the medium of textiles.

Vivienne Molloy is a Textile Artist based in Dublin and is a graduate of Textile Art and Artefact from the National College of Art and Design. Vivienne’s ambition is to pursue a career in Costume Design for Stage and Screen. She has just completed her first year studying Costume Design and Make-up in Inchicore College of Further Education.

Email: Vivienne.elizabeth.molloy@gmail.com
Instagram: @viviennemolloy

ALEC MOORE
All Farewells are Sudden
Photography

All Farewells are Sudden is freezing time and then… freezing time again. As it relentlessly moves forward and reminds me that everything will always be too late.

Alec Moore is revisiting the practice of photography after many years exploring nonvisual artistic disciplines.

RACHEL NAUGHTON
Soak
Video

Soak is a moving image piece that looks at the canal as a place of pause, a spot for contemplation among the constant busyness of the city. In this piece, as is common in my practice, the body of water is used to reflect a sense of deep time, outside ourselves. I find we’re drawn to water because of these projections we attach to it along with the meditative state of escape we can find ourselves in as we get lost in the water. The simplicity and stillness of this piece imitates this for the viewer.

Rachel Naughton’s art practice is informed by a preoccupation with time. More specifically, she is concerned with how we perceive time in relation to its geological and human registers. Drawing from our experience of the natural world and the sense of time imposed on us through standardised clock time, Rachel aims to draw attention to the multifarious conceptions of time.

Temporal attributes/strategies such as accumulation, suspension and repetition are employed in her attempt to manifest a sense of time across various media. Working primarily across printmaking and moving image, Rachel manipulates both the static and dynamic image to activate these temporal qualities.

The use of moving image has been a large component in her exploration of ideas surrounding time. Shes uses cinematic strategies, namely slow cinema, in order to emphasise a sense of extended duration, privileging a sense of stillness and everydayness.

www.rachelnaughton.com
Instagram: @rachel.naughton.art
Vimeo: @rachelnaughton

KENNY MURPHY
Illuminations
Mixed Media

Taking its name from Irish decorated text, turning the mundane into spectacle Illuminations is a project that explores which public objects disguise themselves in the margins as mundane; asking us to pre-accept what is part of our everyday life before we can question these objects and their implications. Bringing these objects to light, Illuminations, tries to imagine what we can do with this knowledge once we have produced it.

Kenny Murphy is an Irish based, interdisciplinary artist (b. 17th Oct). Their work weighs themes of the Marxist superstructure against contemporary life and art. Murphy sources the foundations of their work from new aesthetics propagated by Ireland’s neoliberal society. Their practice is located in the urban landscape, is explicitly political and often intersects with state institutions.

Murphy has collaborated with a number of artists across many practices including; science, hardware and software, computational creativity, documentary photography, live performance, the historical environment, systems and physical structures, nature, reality and artificiality.

CAOIMHE JANE REYNOLDS
Holding Pool
Sculpture

I am a fish 

Caoimhe’s work revolves around isolation, control, colour influences, apparatus and instructions; used to direct or inhibit our movements in progression from one space to another. Muted green emerges regularly on application forms as a colour of payments, procedures and permission – seeking.

Her work is also contextually responsive to writings of screenwriter for The Truman Show; Andrew Niccol and Foucaults ideas on hetrotopias, a floating surface. Water divides continents, lands and people; water holds power, information and is transparent which is a key to surveillance.

Caoimhe was born in Kuwait, grew up both in the Middle East and Dublin. She graduated from sculpture in NCAD in 2017. This work is a continuation from a number of residencies during 2018 and 2019. Most recently Loughshinny Boathouse Studio awarded by Fingal County Council and Borrowed Ground in the Droichead Arts Centre.

Email: caoimhejanereynolds@gmail.com
Instagram: @caoimhe_jane

SARA SERPILLI
The Sole
Illustration

The Sole is a series composed by three Illustrations that explore the theme of the pilgrimage and more largely emigration. The Boots, the Feet, the luggage and other elements on the Illustrations are used as symbols of the journey made to land in a certain area and “gain the status of Local”.

Belonging to a specific area is the result of a choice, a journey or the result of economic, societal, cultural and personal events. I wanted to work around the journey and efforts that lead to a certain area, and stress as well the fragility that being or becoming “Local” represent nowadays. 

Sara Serpilli is an Italian Photographer/Illustrator currently living in Dublin. She studied Photography and Contemporary Art in France. Since 2017 she started to create Illustrations using watercolours and ink.

www.saraserpilli.wixsite.com
Email: sara.serpilli@gmail.com
Instagram: @saraserpilli
Facebook: somethingblueparis

YOHANN WALTER
in collaboration with Shane Finan, Reloutino and Mr Toast
Super Sláinte & Everyday is like Monday
Video Game

Super Sláinte
Less than six weeks away from the Brexit deadline. Border checks will be an inevitable consequence of a no-deal Brexit. With no sign of a breakthrough, we could be just weeks away from seeing the return of trade barriers on this island. And of fierce forces to stop you from completing your ultimate quest: to smuggle fireworks for Halloween night.

Fuel yourself with pints and craic, break through dublin’s northside, face scavengers, cross the border, dodge para-military forces and get your hand on the greatest firecracker of all time.

Everyday is like Monday
Monday is back, and you have to face it, you have to face them and their madness, again and again

Yohann Walter is a French visual and new media artist currently based in Ireland. His work widely explores the landscape and the role of narration, questioning and playing with their viability, impact or decline. Associate university lecturer, in his free time Yohann teaches digital communication, gamification, new media narratives and studio photography.

www.yohann-walter.com
Email: yohann.walter@gmail.com
Facebook: @yohannwalter
Instagram: @yohannwalter