18 Nov. 2016–25 Feb 2017 

An illustrated publication of “Made in Cork” will be published in the Autumn by the Friends of Crawford.

This fresh perspective on the Irish Arts and Crafts movement brings together key artists including James Archer, Michael J. McNamara, Joseph Higgins and the lesser known Annie Crooke and Kathleen Murphy O’Connor and is guest curated by art historian Vera Ryan. 

William Morris (d.1896) and Walter Crane (d.1915), leaders of the Arts and Crafts movement in England were socialists. However, when the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland was founded in 1894 its aims were broadly patriotic. It hoped to stimulate the production of arts and crafts in Ireland, dispelling the traditional hierarchies between fine and applied art, by making the craftsperson "less of a machine producing many objects from one pattern" and more of an individual working from original design through exhibitions, lectures, publications etc. 

Many ideals of Morris and Crane were espoused by James Brenan, headmaster of the Cork School of Art (from 1860-1889) before the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland was created.   Brenan worked at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and saw the prevailing theory of the application of Art to Industry in a positive light. The magnificent extension to the Cork School of Art, built in 1884, with  £20,000 donated by local businessman WH Crawford provided the city with the finest art school in the country and the means to excel at woodcarving and lace-making amongst other applied arts. 

Such was the quality of work being produced in Cork, that in 1893 a chair carved by Annie Crooke from County Cork was exhibited at the Chicago World's Fair. The intricately carved armchair and other furniture in the exhibition, exemplifies the expression of the Arts and Crafts ideal of beautiful and useful objects for use in the domestic home. 

Taking inspiration from Gaelic League’s metalwork demonstrations at the Cork International Exhibition of 1902, shortly afterwards the Youghal Art Metal Workers were formed. The new Abbey Theatre purchased a number of huge mirrors for interior decoration and, a number of these magnificent works, will be displayed alongside for the first time since the Abbey Fire of 1951. 

"Made in Cork: The Arts and Crafts Movement 1880's – 1920's" brings to life the cross section of people involved in the Arts and Crafts movement in Cork, where artisan workers in lace and metalwork, the Cork School of Art, artists, craftspeople, religious orders and business families like the Days, Egan & Sons, and James Watson & Sons flourished and influenced the wider social structure of Cork and beyond. 

Click here to download an essay and exhibition guide by Vera Ryan.

8 October 2016–12 February 2017

Three Centuries of Irish Art from a National Collection 
The State Apartments and Coach House Galleries, Dublin Castle

“The magnificent surrounds of Dublin Castle will provide an ideal backdrop for the Crawford’s first-ever exhibition in Dublin.” 
Heather Humphreys TD
Minister for Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs

The Crawford at the Castle sees the collection of Crawford Art Gallery travel to Dublin for the first time in its near 200-year history. 

Founded as a school of art and ‘saloon of sculpture’ in 1819, the collection at Crawford Art Gallery began with the prestigious gift of ‘Canova Casts’ from the Prince Regent who, as King George IV, visited Dublin in 1821. The Throne Room at Dublin Castle is so named for this visit. This is just one of the many resonances between these two institutions traced by the exhibition.

The Crawford at the Castle displays a selection of works from the gallery’s collection, which provide a survey of aspects of Irish art from 1730 to 2015. Displayed in the State Apartments and Coach House Galleries, the exhibition explores pertinent themes to such a historic setting, the former administrative centre of Ireland in the heart of our capital.

From the State Corridor which showcases Neoclassical prints and Romantic sketches, visitors to the exhibition will journey through themes of Enlightenment and Revolution in the Minerva Room, questions of National Identity in the King’s Room, images of our Environment and the Natural World in the Arts & Sciences Room, and expressions of the Artist at Activist in the Queen’s Room. In addition to these, ideas of Power and Knowledge are evoked in trough lens-based works exhibited in the Coach House Galleries in the neighbouring Dubh Linn Gardens. 

This exhibition serves to highlight the continuing roles of Crawford Art Gallery as a National Cultural Institution for the visual arts and Dublin Castle as a place of historical, cultural, and political significance.

Curated by Anne Boddaert and Dr Michael Waldron

A companion catalogue, edited by Peter Murray and published by Dublin Castle, is available to purchase from mid-October 2016.

Works in THE CRAWFORD AT THE CASTLE exhibition:

• George Mounsey Wheatley Atkinson: Paddle Steamer Entering the Port of Cork
• Robert Ballagh: The Rape of the Sabines, after David
• James Barry: Orpheus Instructing a Savage People
• James Barry: A Grecian Harvest Home
• James Barry: Crowning the Victors at Olympia
• James Barry: The Thames, or the Triumph of Navigation
• James Barry: The Distribution of Premiums in the Society of Arts
• James Barry: Elysium and Tartarus, or the State of Final Retribution
• James Barry: Portrait of Burke and Barry in the Guise of Ulysses and a Companion fleeing from the Cave of Polyphemus
• Francis Bindon: Portrait of Jonathan Swift
• Muriel Brandt: The Breadline, 1916
• James Brenan: News from America
• James Brenan: Patchwork
• John Butts: A View of Cork from Audley Place
• Circle of Allan Ramsay: Portrait of Robert Emmet, M.D. of Cork
• Circle of Allan Ramsay: Portrait of Mrs Emmet
• Margaret Clarke: The Dressmaker
• Jerome Connor: Siren
• Barrie Cooke: The Lough Derg Pike: life size, with relics 
• Dorothy Cross: Bone Room Print
• Dorothy Cross: Jellyfish Lake
• Willie Doherty: Evergreen Memories
• Doug DuBois: Sweeny Jumps into Cork Harbour
• Rita Duffy: Segregation 
• Micheal Farrell: Black ‘47
• Samuel Forde: The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan
• Samuel Forde: Portrait of the Artist (Self-Portrait)
• Samuel Forde: Original Sketch for Fall of the Rebel Angels
• Samuel Forde: Oil Sketch for Fall of the Rebel Angels
• John Halpin: After Patinir
• Anthony Haughey: Famine Eviction Scene: Model World, Newtownmountkennedy
• Martin Healy: Last Man
• Patrick Hennessy: Elizabeth Bowen at Bowen’s Court 
• Grace Henry: Claddagh Market, Galway 
• Joseph Higgins: An Strachaire Fir 
• Robert Hunter: Portrait of the Penrose Family
• Joseph Malachy Kavanagh: The Cockle Pickers
• Seán Keating: Men of the South
• Sir John Lavery: The Red Rose
• Sarah-Jane Lynagh: Red Madonna
• Daniel MacDonald: Bowling Match at Castlemary, Cloyne 
• Daniel MacDonald: The Eviction
• Murdo MacLeod: Portrait of Roy Keane
• Daniel Maclise: The Falconer
• Brian Maguire: Figure Silenced 
• Fergus Martin: Head 3
• F.E. McWilliam: Woman in a Bomb Blast 
• Thomas Moore: Irish Melodies (with illustrations by Daniel Maclise) 
• Séamus Murphy: Deirdre (of the Sorrows) 
• Alanna O’Kelly: The Country Blooms, a Garden and a Grave
• Tony O’Malley: Hawk and Quarry in Winter – In Memory of Peter Lanyon
• Vivienne Roche: Tomb 
• Nigel Rolfe: Into the Mire
• Martin Archer Shee: The Postman
• Oliver Sheppard: Aida 
• Mary Swanzy: Samoan Scene 
• Unknown: Speech of Robert Emmet, Esq.
• Jack B. Yeats: A Race in Hy Brazil  
• Jack B. Yeats: Returning from the Bathe, Mid-Day 

Ongoing

Our Choice is an exhibition annually held at the Crawford Art Gallery. Each work on display has been chosen by staff members and the exhibition is a tribute to all colleagues giving them an opportunity to choose a piece of work reflecting their own personal tastes. 

The permanent collection has expanded to over 3,000 works since its inception. Moving toward the 200th Anniversary of the Crawford’s foundation, recognition and acknowledgment of the collection seems appropriate by the present day staff of the Crawford Art Gallery.

15 July 2016–1 April 2017

Crawford Art Gallery is delighted to present a series of interventions, installations and surprises by Irish artist Annie O’Ne entitled Canthus from 15 July 2016– 1 April 2017.

Within the historic and contemporary galleries Annie O’Ne will draw attention to the overlooked and unannounced; ‘Like a flicker in the corner of the eye, Canthus @ Crawford exists only as a glimpse, expanding and contracting in scale and duration, unannounced, unmediated and unidentified’.

Employing sculpture, video and photography as a platform to address the interplay between space and perception, throughout the eight month ‘virtual residency’, O’Ne will
leave evidence of her presence, sometimes subtly through distorting imagery, sometimes by disrupting and constructing alternative viewing conditions where the viewer may become the object.

Art historian Grant Kester1 has identified art as having ‘a unique power to disrupt, destabilise, or otherwise confound the viewer’s conventional perceptions of the world.’ In
Canthus, Annie O’Ne seeks to create disjunctures or interruptions in the normal flow of the gallery experience to create a momentary state of uncertainty that comes about
through the realization of something unexpected. O’Ne hopes these moments of rupture will act as springboards for new ways of looking, thinking and re-evaluating conventional perceptions about art and our world.

For further information & images contact: dawnwilliams@crawfordartgallery.ie
T: +353 (0) 21 4807853

11 March–10 June 2017

Three Centuries of Irish Art from a National Collection

This exhibition showcases master works from our national collection. 

Here the works have been carefully refigured, following their formal display in the State Apartments and Coach House Galleries at Dublin Castle (October 2016 - February 2017). 

Since 1204, Dublin Castle has operated as a fortress, vice-regal court, prison, government complex, seat of power, and has now been re-imagined as an cultural site. The Crawford at the Castle exhibition displayed a selection of works from the Crawford Collection and allowed for the creation of multi-layered resonances exploring themes of power, state, and identity. Returning to Cork, this exhibition offers a unique juxtaposition of historical and contemporary art and examines recurring themes in our social history and personal narratives. 

Featuring works by, among others, Robert Ballagh, James Barry, Barrie Cooke, Dorothy Cross, Rita Duffy, Micheal Farrell, Seán Keating, Daniel MacDonald, Brian Maguire, F.E. McWilliam, Alanna O’Kelly, Tony O’Malley, Vivienne Roche, Nigel Rolfe, Mary Swanzy, and Jack B. Yeats, it also marks a homecoming for Sir John Lavery’s The Red Rose (1923) after several years at Áras an Uachtaráin. 

The Crawford at the Castle seeks to invite our audiences and community to reflect on the historical narratives that we accept through the lens of three centuries of Irish art. 

Free guided tours: 

* Saturday 18 March, 1pm 

* Thursday 6 April, 5:30pm 

* Friday 7 April, 1pm 

Free public lecture  Thursday 6 April 1pm 

All Through the Years: Images of the Social and Political in The Crawford at the Castle exhibition 

by Dr Éimear O'Connor, HRHA 

Ongoing

Favourite works from the Crawford Collection are on display in the historic Gibson Galleries and include Seán Keatings 'Men of the South'; Jack B. Yeats 'Off the Donegal Coast'; John Lavery's The Funeral of Terence MacSwiney' sit alongside works from the 1916 Art Trail. 

30 MARCH–8 JULY 2017

Jasmina Cibic (b. Ljubljana 1979, based in London) works in performance, installation and film, employing a range of activity, media and theatrical tactics to redefine or reconsider the currency and formats of national representation. Cibic re-envisions nationally representative architecture and art as props and framing devices that nation states and political bodies use when they assert control and enact protocol rituals.

The film The Nation Loves It explores the role of architecture as an agent of political rhetoric through a single character whose speech is an amalgam of the words of global public figures scripted from a myriad of political speeches. These redacted proclamations were originally made by politically engaged figures who invested in architecture's relationship to national identity on an international stage. Cibic invited the artist Tim Etchells to contribute to the project reworking a selection of speeches on new nationally and ideologically endorsed architectural projects into a single monologue. 

His text “Starting” served as the base for the films script which was performed by Cathy Naden. Itemphasizes politicians use of key words which vary from the pastiche to the zealous, whilst other excerpts demonstrate the weight of social-political expectation of metaphorically constructing a nation through the physical construction of a building.

Jasmina Cibic's work draws a parallel between the construction of national culture and its use value for political aims, encouraging the viewer to consider the timelessness of psychological and soft power mechanisms that are utilised by individuals and political powers for their own reinsertion and reinvention. 

The film, perhaps, has particular resonance as Ireland moves forward from recession and enters a renewed expansion of new building projects and economic growth – will we learn from the past or be swayed again by political and capital rhetoric? 

Jasmina Cibic represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennial with her project For Our Economy and Culture and was awarded the MAC International Prize (2016), the largest contemporary art prize in Ireland.  Upcoming projects in 2017 include solo exhibitions The Spirit of Our Needs, Kunstmuseum Krefeld,; Build Quickly, Build Swiftly, Build Well, ‘O’Space, Aarhus; and group exhibitions Casebooks, Ambika P3, London; Aéroports / Villes-Mondes, Gaîté Lyrique, Paris; and Videonale.16, Kunstmuseum Bonn. 

26 May–12 August

Multiple ceramic bells and mesmeric static musical figurines installed in the Crawford Art Gallery prompt the viewer to pause a while. The work allows a moment, for the imagination to grow with the sounds prompted by the visual spectacle.

McCarthy’s practice has long concerned itself with promoting the simple of idea of listening. In a departure from creating sound, for this exhibition, McCarthy foregrounds our daily, ever present background soundscape.

The Artist brings together over 500 found ceramic objects, which have been either muted by the artist or by their material restrictions. McCarthy is a gatherer and scours car boot sales and second hand shops to find discarded objects that have been overlooked and under used.

Beyond Silence playfully triggers memories to create potential imaginary mindscapes. The installations are accompanied by drawings created by the artist during a recent residency at the prestigious Rauschenberg Foundation in Florida. McCarthy immersed himself in the legacy of Robert Rauschenberg’s practise, which led to his use of erasure as a tool of engagement in the drawings and further engaged with his interest in listening.

Danny McCarthy is one of Ireland’s pioneers of performance art and sound art and he continues to be a leading exponent exhibiting and performing both in Ireland and abroad. McCarthy is also gatherer and scours car boot sales and second hand shops to find discarded objects that have been overlooked and under used.

McCarthy’s is also interested in acoustic ecology and collates ‘lost sounds’ - evident in his Found Sound (Lost at Sea) at Crawford Art Gallery (2011-2016) and his work Mutus Liber focuses his concern for lost sonic soundscapes.  

McCarthy asked Hubert Bookbinding to create a handcrafted book containing found perforated music paper.  The music paper, that would have been ubiquitous a century ago, was at the forefront of popular culture when many fairground and cinematic attractions would feature pianolas (a self-playing piano). McCarthy captures the now muted sounds in archival form perhaps in the hope that the next generation may find a willingness to listen and explore sounds from history.

Publication launch:
Responding to the exhibition Beyond Silence: A Bell Rings in an Empty Sky a publication featuring text and visuals David Toop, Stephen Vitiello, Helen Fossi (Soundfjord), Paul Hegarty, Rachel Warner, Cristin Leach, Bernard Clarke and John Godfrey will be launched between 12-3pm, Saturday 8 July, 2017.

The publication is published by Farpoint Recordings priced €20.

Performance: 22–23 June 2017
Exhibition: 24 June–26 Aug. 2017 

Box Office
11am–6pm, 24 Grand Parade (between the two entrances to the English Market). Open every day until the end of the festival.

First shown at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios and premiered as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival (29 September–5 November, 2017), Breaking Rainbows by Orla Barry, a live performance and installation, continues its tour to Crawford Art Gallery and the Cork Midsummer Festival.

Exploring the boundaries of art and life, Breaking Rainbows uses the relationship between wo/man and animal, and the cannibalistic, symbiotic tension between [Orla Barry] the artist and [Orla Barry] the shepherd to reflect on the primal and poetic and unpredictable bond we have with the natural world. Presented as a live performance and video installation, Barry’s new work is a fascinating journey into the land of shepherding through the lens of ‘doing’ rather than ‘observing’ the job at hand. The tour began in Temple Bar Gallery & Studios as part of Dublin Theatre Festival last October and continues in Crawford Art Gallery. 

Endearing, humorous and challenging, Breaking Rainbowsreflects on both our interdependence and disconnection from the natural environment. Made up of a series of vignettes, Barry’s new work brings us into a journey through time, conceptualisations and effects: from the realms of sheep farming traditions, ancient Greek shepherd’s singing competitions, contemporary consumerism and gender roles, to the intimate relationship of caring for a sheep about to give birth. 

Interweaving live performance, video, a 300kg pile of wool produced on Barry’s farm in 2015, and an aural landscape which touches many different forms of speech, Breaking Rainbows is congruous with Orla Barry’s multidisciplinary aesthetic. However, as in her most recent work, Mountain, it also marks a new step in her trajectory by introducing chance procedures and a collaborative approach to the development of the texts. This results in the stories being reinvented and reshaped, defying notions of ownership, authorship and authenticity, and thus also reflecting on the nature of oral storytelling as transferred throughout generations. This is played out in an unpredictable dramaturgy in which no performance or experience of the installation is the same.
Orla Barry is both visual artist and shepherd. She lived in Brussels for sixteen years and now runs a flock of pedigree Lleyn sheep in rural Wexford. A leitmotif running through her recent work is the human disconnection from the natural environment. Barry writes, and makes performances, video and sound installations. She has shown work at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, SMAK and Tate Modern, amongst others, as well as taking part in Manifesta 2. 

Crawford Art Gallery
Performance:
Thursday 22 June, 6pm
Friday 23 June, 6pm
Booking via Cork Midsummer Festival: http://www.corkmidsummer.com/

Video installation of work open to public in gallery: Saturday 24 June – Saturday 26 August 2017
Free entry, Monday – Saturday, 10am – 5pm with late opening on Thursday until 8pm

Written and directed by Orla Barry; Collaborators Einat
Tuchman, Derrick Devine, Marcus Lamb; Performers Einat Tuchman, Dick Walsh; Commissioned and produced by Wexford Arts Centre, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios; Co-production Kaaitheater, ARGOS centre for art and media, Crawford Art Gallery; Funded by Arts Council of Ireland and by Culture Ireland; Supported by Dublin Theatre Festival, Midsummer Festival Cork, Opera Festival Wexford & IMMA’s residency program.

Breaking Rainbows is supported by an Arts Council Touring and Dissemination of Work Award. 

Breaking Rainbows will tour to Wexford Arts Centre & Wexford Festival Opera: Performance 20-21 October at 8pm | Exhibition 23 October-18 November 2017.

For further information on the artist or performance/exhibition please contact Dawn Williams, Curator, Crawford Art Gallery, Emmet Place, Cork on +353 (0)21 490 7853 or email dawnwilliams@crawfordartgallery.ie. 

14 – 18 September

For four days only, Crawford Art Gallery and the Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival present a collaboration with internationally renowned Icelandic artist, Ragnar Kjartansson, from Thursday 14 - Monday 18 September.
The short film, Guilt Trip, shows a man dressed in black carrying a bright yellow shopping bag full of gun cartridges, trudging through a sublime frozen landscape. At regular intervals, the figure rummages through the bag, loads and nonchalantly fires the gun, at a non-disclosed target. Kjartansson’s figure is a personal tragicomic portrait of defeat and defiance, in conflict with earth’s most unforgiving environment. Filmed in surround sound, the searing sounds of the gun discharging and the eerie beauty of the glacial landscape create a beguiling viewer experience. 

Kjartansson engages multiple artistic mediums throughout his performative practice. The artist’s work incorporates the history of film, music, visual culture, and literature. His works are connected through their pathos and humour, with each deeply influenced by the comedy and tragedy of classical theatre. Kjartansson's use of durational, repetitive performance to harness collective emotion is a hallmark of his practice and recurs throughout his work. 

Guilt Trip, follows on from the screening, A Whole Lot of Sorrow, by Ragnar Kjartansson at the Crawford Art Gallery in partnership with Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival in September 2015. 

More About Ragnar Kjartansson

Kjartansson (b. 1976) lives and works in Reykjavík. The artist has had solo exhibitions at the Reykjavík Art Museum, the Barbican Centre, London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Park, Washington D.C., the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the New Museum, New York, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and the BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna.  Kjartansson participated in The Encyclopaedic Palace at the Venice Biennale in 2013, Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2014, and he represented Iceland at the 2009 Venice Biennale. The artist is the recipient of the 2015 Artes Mundi’s Derek Williams Trust Purchase Award, and Performa’s 2011 Malcolm McLaren Award. 

Until 21 October 2017

This exhibition takes its title from a painting by Daniel O’Neill, and features Irish paintings from the mid to late decades of the twentieth century, drawn from the Great Southern Collection, presented to the Crawford Art Gallery by the State in 2006.

Beginning in 1959, the collection was assembled by Ireland’s transport authority CIÉ - Córas Iompair Éireann. The collection was named after the chain of prestigious Great Southern hotels, in Killarney, Parknasilla, Kenmare, Sligo and other locations, that formed part of the CIÉ Group. Works of art continued to be acquired until the hotel group was transferred to new ownership in 2005. 

The Collection is particularly strong in the work of Norah McGuinness, Daniel O’Neill and Gerard Dillon, while artists such as Camille Souter, Nano Reid, Arthur Armstrong and Patrick Collins are also represented. 

The majority of paintings are figurative, with an emphasis on landscape, but there are also fine non-representational works, by Cecil King and Patrick Scott.

8 September – 28 October

Sonia Shiel's exhibition, Rectangle, squared. features large-scale paintings, punctuated by smaller scale sculptures and an accompanying text written by the artist. Shiel’s immersive works invite you to explore the illusory world in which a fictional artist finds herself. For example, in one ‘scene’, the artist is presented with a rectangle in which she is mistaken for a tree. In another, the bubble she has lived in literally bursts open, and she sees the world as if for the first time.  

Shiel's far-fetched work contemplates the mundane drama of living and various traditions of story-telling. Bold, yet enigmatic, her works conjure theatrical connotations both through their life-size scale, and in their staged scenarios. Shiel's monologue provides additional context to the works' materiality, both real and imagined, and ultimately explores what it means to be creative. Rectangle, squared.exaggerates a sense of the quizzical and mischievousness that we encounter in our everyday lives while trying to make sense of our surroundings. 

Sonia Shiel has exhibited extensively in Ireland and internationally.  Recent projects include Rewildering, NCAD Gallery, Dublin (2017); Henrietta hyvä, HIAP Helsinki FIN (2016), ISCP, New York; (2014) Unseen Presence; Project Space, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2014), Misadventure Seeks Rainy Afternoon, Oonagh Young Gallery (2013). In 2014 she completed the Art & Law Fellowship Program at Fordham Law School, the International Studio & Curatorial Program and residency at IMMA (2014/15). Much of the work for this exhibition has been developed during her residency at University College Dublin, in the School of Arts and Humanities, with the support of the Arts Council Visual Artists Bursary and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.

14 July–4 November 2017

Seduced by the concept of the ideal home-maker and the working woman as proposed by the media, Aideen Barry’s stop-motion film, Not to be Known, shows the artist overwhelmed by the monotony and magnitude of domestic chores in nightmarish scenarios. To maintain the tension between reality and aspiration, the artist’s Medusa-like hair of vacuum cleaner hoses prepares and cooks the perfect family meal, irons the laundry, whilst she ‘keeps up appearances’, sitting quietly at the kitchen table, sipping tea, and scrolling through visual images of the ‘dream’ kitchen – i.e. spotless and non-functioning – on her Smartphone. The hair becomes so busy that it demands Barry’s body and drags her upstairs to make the bed, suggesting that adherence to her chores is a far greater need than maintaining an apparent quality of life. Finally, she chops off her vacuum tentacles in an effort to find her life outside the domestic space. 

Barry’s performances are often physically and mentally demanding mirroring similar pressures on the female body which are exerted by our society. The dark humoured, uncanny film expands upon her interests in monachopsis – the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place - and her exploration of obsessional behaviour in the context of suburban normality. 

Not to Be Known was commissioned by the Arts & Heritage Trust, UK. 

Aideen Barry (*Cork, 1979) has a national and international profile.  Her means of expression are interchangeable and incorporates performance, film, animation, drawing and sculptural forms. Projects include a solo show at MARFA Contemporary, Texas (2018); The Lexicon Commission Award (2017); By Association – A Performative Response to Carol Rama, Commissioned by the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Lismore Castle Arts (2016); and Brittlefield: A Solo Survey, RHA Gallery, Dublin (2016). 

3 November–25 November 2017

PROGRAMME OF TICKETED PERFORMANCES

Evening Dinner Performance with The Domestic Godless 

The Domestic Godless present a buffet of local and far flung delicacies from their fifteen-year repertoire. "Prawn-head smoothies", "20,000 Leagues Under Cork Harbour Flapjack", if it were not so real, you would think it was fictional.

This will be a selection of food for the adventurous diner. Unfortunately specific dietary requirements cannot be catered for.

Evening Dinner Performance with The Domestic Godless 
Thursday 23 November, 6:30-8:30pm 
Price: €40
limited capacity: 22

Click here to book a performance

Brunch/Closing Performance with The Domestic Godless 
Saturday 25 November, 11:00am - 2:00pm

Free, but first come, first served!
_____________________________________________

For fifteen years The Domestic Godless have been working on the very fringes of Ireland’s blossoming gastronomic renaissance employing food (its taste its presentation its production and cultural values) as artistic material for irreverent experimentation.

They have trodden a fine line between cuisine and art, researching the stranger corners of global food culture, creating installations, banquets and performances in such places as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the majestic Castletown House in Kildare, an abandoned hotel in the heart of Athens and a mini-skip at the gates of City Hall in Belfast.

The Domestic Godless have been working together in a time that has seen food culture change dramatically in Ireland. Originally inspired by the Dada art movement of the early twentieth century, Domestic Godless create unpredictable and unorthodox food combinations, their recipes subvert prevalent visual and tasting norms promoting confusion and delight of the idiom ‘you eat with your eyes’ - exploring the relationship between contemporary art and food and its cultural currency.

The Cork-based group's three week residency in the expansive Upper Gallery of the Crawford Art Gallery will explore contemporary visual art and food from a unique and tangible entry point. Domestic Godless will explore food as both a concept and a medium through which to convey humour, empathy and to comment on wider cultural and social issues, creating dadaesque concoctions of inventive, high quality dishes within the setting of multi-media visual displays, anarchic sculptural installations and memorable experiential food tasting by the visiting public.

A recipe book will be produced, part funded by a Fund It campaign, to celebrate Domestic Godless's practice and wider cultural impact documenting the collaborations and performances including recipe column featured in VAI Newsletter from 2004.

The residency and subsequent tour will involve local communities, artists, foodmakers, foragers, philosophers and teachers in creating tasting evenings, light lunches and workshops. The focus on celebrating local resources and communities is reflected in the variety of strategic regional partners: Galway Arts Centre partnering Galway Arts Festival; Callan Union Workhouse; Solstice Arts Centre, Navan; Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny partnering Perspective Festival and Uillinn, Skibbereen. Funded by the Arts Council Touring and Dissemination of Work Scheme.

About the artists:

The Domestic Godless were founded by artists Stephen Brandes and Mick O’Shea, (later to be joined by Irene Murphy) under the Cork Artist’s Collective banner at the exhibition Artists/Groups at The Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 2003. They have introduced to the world such delights as Sea Urchin Pot Noodle, Foot & Mouth Terrine, Carpaccio of Giant African Land Snail and Victorian high tea wrought from all manner of fertilizer, often in the setting of anarchic installations.

Recent events have included 'Invasive Pests': Waiting for the Barbarians, Athens Biennale,

Hotel Bageion, Omonoeia Square, Athens, Greece, May 2017; ‘A Gastronomic Evening of Invasive Pests’ atthe Science Gallery, Dublin, April 2016; ’20,000 Leagues Under Cork Harbour’, Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, September 2015, ‘A Reinvention of the Irish Breakfast’ at the National Design Gallery, Kilkenny, May 2015 and a cookery school at the Cook’s Academy in Dublin during the Bram Stoker Festival in 2014. Between 2014 and 2015 they toured “Canaliculus Pergamentorum”, to Kinsale Arts Festival, Tulca Art Festival, Galway and Broadstone Studios, Dublin, which saw the Domestic Godless create a 30 metre canal of sewageducting, on which travelled an array of dishes inspired by the bitter-sweet reminiscences of miserable Summer holidays.