13 April - 9 June

Gibson Galleries

NIGHT CLASS is a response to Crawford Art Gallery’s archive, often unseen materials that are imprinted with evocative layers of informal histories and invisible labour.  

This gallery building functioned as a School of Art from 1832 until 1979 and, during this time, professional photographers were periodically hired to stage and document examples of painting, sculpture, and lacemaking. These images of fine art students’ labour were printed in aspirational prospectuses promoting the work of the institution.  

In NIGHT CLASS, Jan McCullough uses photography and sculptural intervention to make visible alternative forms of labour and knowledge. She was drawn to the archive’s quietly forgotten register of technical classes – building construction, carpentry, and painting and decorating – which often took place at night. Her works also explore the fabric of the building itself; the interventions and the skilled work of technicians and caretakers that have been part of the building’s maintenance for over a hundred years. 

This project also represents a personal performance by the artist. Entering the building with a camera at night alongside the gallery’s caretakers and cleaning staff, McCullough immersed herself in the nocturnal rhythms of the gallery, learning to construct, reframe, stage and document the remnants of past actions – a night class of her own. 

Jan McCullough is a Belfast-based artist who explores the human acts of construction, fabrication and DIY, and the communities of interest and place that form around them.  

Commissioned by Crawford Art Gallery as part of BUILDING AS WITNESS, kindly supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012-2023. 

With additional support from Arts Council Ireland and the Making and Momentum [In Conversation with Eileen Gray] Artist Bursary. 

Image © Jan McCullough, Frame Work II, from the series Night Class, 2024.

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