The Eleanor Lawler Performance Art Residency

The Eleanor Lawler Performance Art Residency 

In partnership The MART Gallery & Studios and Livestock the Performance Art Platform we are delighted to announce The Eleanor Lawler Performance Art Residency. 

This residency award aims to carry on the curatorial legacy of Eleanor Lawler, who endeavoured to create a space of support, development and care for performance artists and their practice. 

This inaugural year Conor Coady and Fiona Gordon have been offered a week long studio residency to develop and expand their performance practice, held during December in MART HX Gallery. The artists will receive support and mentorship provided by Livestock curators Francis Fay and Katherine Nolan, and space provision and organisational support by MART Gallery directors Ciara Scanlan and Matthew Nevin.

As part of the residency the Directors of MART and Livestock are proud to have partnered with Bernard O’Rourke and Ewa Pypno who have developed a brand new website for Livestock: http://livestock-art.com/ . This serves as an archive and online exhibition of all Livestock events and activities right back to 2010. And for the one week in December the website will host a special online screening of a performance to video work by Eleanor Lawler.

This project is running as part of MART’s 2021 programme which was kindly supported by The Arts Council of Ireland. The programme focuses on providing a range of opportunities for Live Artists through workspace, exhibition and live event space to develop, present, document and critically discuss their work. The programme includes artists from across the country and of all career levels, in order to build, strengthen, and support arts in Ireland. With a growing body of performance artists in Ireland, whose work has a power to speak to audiences through practices that are rich and diverse, we are proud to focus on this exciting discipline, to provide a platform for the temporal nature of performance and its artists.

About the Artists:

Conor Coady – Artist in Residence from 29th Nov – 5th Dec

Conor Coady is an Irish visual and performance artist originally from Co. Kilkenny and Co.Carlow, living and practising in Ireland. He studied Sculpture and Combined Media at Limerick School of Art & Design, has since been practising through performance and collaboration. He was the Emerging Artist Residency Award winner at Burren College of Art, and soon after shortlisted for the RDS Awards Exhibition 2018, Dublin, curated by Amanda Coogan. Coady has proactively exhibited in group shows including at Draiocht Gallery, Blanchardstown, Dublin, King Johns Castle, Limerick, MART Gallery, Rathmines, Dublin, KFest Music and Arts Festival, Kilorgan, Kerry, Dali&Gala Warehouse, Cork City as well as participating in performance art installations in EVA International 2016 and 2018. He is a member of EVIL Limerick Performance collective, and has performed at EVIL A Night of Live Art No.2, 2018. 

As of October 2018 Coady has begun an ongoing artistic collaboration with visual artist Grace McEvoy entitled Echtrae which incorporates lens-based media with aspects of performance  art with resulting installations and group shows exhibited in 2019. 

Visit: https://conorcoady.weebly.com/ 

Fiona Gordon- Artist in Residence from 6th – 12th Dec

Fiona Gordon graduated from Limerick School of Art & Design 2021 with a first class honours degree in Fine Art, Sculpture & Combined Media. Her work explores excess, referencing fashion iconography and the overwhelming amount of images of the female body and surrounding ideologies that we absorb daily. This exposes the chasm between women’s interior voice and expectations of exterior perfection. Outlining her own version of female experience through video and digital processes, Fiona flips the restricted, minimized idea of femininity on its head and embraces the surreal and the bizarre. 

Fiona uses performative personalities in her work to explore desires of escapism, femininity in confinement and the notion of being excessive or ‘extra’. She manipulates her image to access and engage with the outside world and capture that all-consuming online and screen-based existence. This captures the fragile relationship between women and imagery. It exposes how editing can completely disturb reality; femininity is then something malleable, manipulated and toyed with. 

Visit: https://www.stayathomehun.com 

FRAGMENT MOUTH – Dominic Thorpe

FRAGMENT MOUTH | Dominic Thorpe

MART HX Gallery

18A Greenmount Lane, Harolds Cross.

 17th – 27th November 2021

Wed – Sat | 1-6pm 

www.mart.ie 

As part of our 2021 programme MART is delighted to announce ‘FRAGMENT MOUTH’ an exhibition of performance documentation, video and drawing selected from a substantial body of work developed over the past number of years by Dominic Thorpe. The work in FRAGMENT MOUTH comes from an ongoing exploration of empathic embodied and contextual responses to collective memory related to Ireland’s history of institutional abuses and conflict. This includes work that explores the complex reality of perpetrator trauma that occurs within contexts of atrocity and gets passed through generations. 

MART’s 2021 programme focuses on providing a range of opportunities for Live Artists through workspace, exhibition and live event space to develop, present, document and critically discuss their work. The programme includes artists from across the country and of all career levels, in order to build, strengthen, and support arts in Ireland. With a growing body of performance artists in Ireland, whose work has a power to speak to audiences through practices that are rich and diverse, we are proud to focus on this exciting discipline, to provide a platform for the temporal nature of performance and its artists.

About the Artist:

Dominic Thorpe is an Irish visual artist who works primarily with performance art, as well as drawing, video, photography, installation, collaborative and relational based processes. Thorpe has shown and performed work widely internationally and in Ireland, including at the Bangkok Cultural Centre, Performance Space UK, The Golden Thread Belfast, Galway Arts Centre, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Bergen Museum of Art, SASA Gallery Adelaide and Mobius Boston. He has work in a number of public collections, including the collection of the Arts Council of Ireland. Much of Thorpe’s recent work addresses contemporary and historical human rights abuses and perpetration, as well as individual and collective memory. He has completed a number of residencies, including at the Nordic Arts Centre, Fire Station Artist Studios Dublin and was the first artist in resident in humanities at University College Dublin. Thorpe has received funding from the Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland, CREATE and Kildare County Council. Throughout his practice, he has engaged with artist-run initiatives as well as inclusion and education-based projects, and is currently on the board of directors of Arts and Disability Ireland and of the Fire Station Artist Studios.

Kindly Supported by The Arts Council of Ireland and The MART Gallery & Studios.

Amanda Coogan – Artist in Residence

Announcing Amanda Coogan as our Artist in Residence 

MART HX Gallery, October 18th – November 7th 2021 

As part of our 2021 programme MART is delighted to host internationally recognised and critically acclaimed artist Amanda Coogan on residency where she will further explore her project ‘Two Women’. 

MART’s 2021 programme focuses on providing a range of opportunities for Live Artists through workspace, exhibition and live event space to develop, present, document and critically discuss their work. The programme includes artists from across the country and of all career levels, in order to build, strengthen, and support arts in Ireland. With a growing body of performance artists in Ireland, whose work has a power to speak to audiences through practices that are rich and diverse, we are proud to focus on this exciting discipline, to provide a platform for the temporal nature of performance and its artists.

About the Artist: 

Amanda Coogan: http://www.amandacoogan.com

Amanda is an internationally recognised and critically acclaimed artist working across the medias of live art, performance, photography and video. She is one of the most dynamic and exciting contemporary visual artist’s practicing in the arena of performance. Her 2015 exhibition in the Dublin’s Royal Hibernian Academy, I’ll sing you a song from around the Town, was described by Artforum as ‘performance art at its best’.

Her extraordinary work is challenging, provocative and always visually stimulating. In 2010 the Irish Times said, ‘Coogan, whose work usually entails ritual, endurance and cultural iconography, is the leading practitioner of performance in the country’. Her expertise lies in her ability to condense an idea to its very essence and communicate it through her body. Using gesture and context she makes allegorical and poetic works that challenge expected contexts.

Her works encompass a multitude of media; Objects, Text, Moving and Still Image but all circulate around her live performances. She is at the forefront of some of the most exciting and prolific durational performances to date. The long durational aspect of her presentations invites elements of chaos with the unknown and unpredicted erupting dynamically through her live artworks, She is first and foremost an embodied practionner. Her work often begins with her own body and challenges the expectations of the contexts, such as head banging to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, and signing the lyrics to Gill Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution will not be Televised’. Her work moves freely between solo presented live performances, group performances and living installation. 

Coogan said ‘I am first and foremost an embodied practitioner. That is to say I construct, develop and understand my way to new work through the physical activity of making. My expertise lies in my ability to condense an idea to an essence and communicate it through my body. This is, possibly, rooted in my biography; I was brought up using Irish Sign Language as my mother tongue. The body, as a site of resistance, is the centrality of my work. My work is described as a site of intersectionality and is interdisciplinary in both form and content. I encompass a multitude of media in my practice; Objects, Text, moving and still Image, all of which circulate around my live performances. At once playful and challenging, my performances also address struggle and psychological resilience. My work is filled with Irish Sign Language vocabulary and littered with literary references. Using gesture and context I make multi-faceted works that leave ghostly trails in the memory.’

Among many awards Coogan received the Allied Irish Bank’s Art prize in 2004. She has performed and exhibited her work extensively including the Broad Museum, Michigan; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, Florida; The Neimeyer Centre, Spain; The MAC, Belfast; Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford; HOME mrc, Manchester; The Golden Thread, Belfast; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Contemporary Irish Art Centre LA, Los Angeles; The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; The Venice Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, The LAB, Dublin; Limerick City Gallery of Art; PS1, New York, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, West Cork Arts Centre; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris and the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. 

​Coogan holds a degree in Sculpture from Dublin’s National College of Art and Design. She was a Masters student of Marina Abramovic at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in Braunschweig, Germany and was awarded her PhD “Deconstructing and Reconstructing live Durational Performance in the Gallery” from the University of Ulster in 2013. She is an occasional lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin; Limerick School of Art and Design; The Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin; Dublin Institute of Technology and Crawford College of Art, Cork. 

Fluid Flesh

‘Fluid Flesh’ showcases new work by Katherine Nolan as part of MART’s 2021 Live Art programme.

Exhibition Dates: 25th Sept – 16th October | Wed-Saturday | 1-6pm at MART HX Studios Gallery.

VENUE NOTE: While the main gallery is being refurbished this exhibition will be held at our MART HX STUDIOS GALLERY,  18A Greenmount Lane Harold’s Cross Dublin, D12 C953

FLUID FLESH

Fluid Flesh, a solo exhibition by Katherine Nolan, examines maternal experience and its intersection with mortality. Through an interplay of performance and the still and moving image the artist grapples with a viscous pink material, evoking flesh as tangible, sensual and yet ultimately beyond our grasp. Thick fluid oozes, spills and clings, re-performing the entanglement of physical and emotional attachment. Through the lens Nolan plays with the temporality of this ever-moving material, making it appear somehow both liquid and statuesque. Forms emerge and recede as if they beat into and out of life. Thus, the work mobilizes the messiness and liquid joy of maternal experience, as well as the bodies repressed precarity. 

First prompted by the artist’s experience of becoming a mother whilst losing her own mother, the work is reframed through the global pandemic, a context in which care and mortality are heightened concepts. Both maternity and the pandemic are moments of radical instability in which our interdependence comes sharply into view. Fluid Flesh seeks to materialise recognition of our precarity and entangled inter-relationality.  Thus, as well as a feminist intervention that seeks to account for and make visible an experience of motherhood through art practice, the artist proposes a view of contemporary existence itself through a Maternal Ontology.

Artist Biography: 

Katherine Nolan; an artist, lecturer and curator specialising in gender and new media. With a particular focus on tensions between the experiential and the spectacular body, her research investigates gender, identity and desire in the context of digital cultures. Recent publications include Life on Pause: Entanglements of the Maternal and The Mortal in a Global Pandemic in Performance in a Pandemic published by Routledge (2021); and Reading Queer Irish Performance across Live and Digital Practices in Interfaces Journal (2021). Working primarily in performance and lens-based media, she has exhibited internationally in Europe, America and Asia and regularly curates with MART, Contemporary Irish Arts Centre Los Angeles and Livestock Performance Art Platform. Recent exhibitions include The Mistress of the Mantle solo exhibition at MART Dublin (2017) and group shows at LACE Los Angeles, Supermarket Art Fair Stockholm and Future Histories at Kilmainham Gaol.

Her extensive teaching experience includes a course leader role at the University of the Arts London and visiting lectureships at The National College of Art and Design, Crawford College of Art and Design and Central Saint Martins, London. She is currently Lecturer in Creative Digital Media in Technological University Dublin, where she has co-developed an MA in Lens-Based Media. She supervises undergraduate and postgraduate projects and her expertise includes practice-based research methodologies.  She is a co-investigator with The Intersections, Feminism, Technology & Digital Humanities network, and a member of the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research.

Visit: www.katherinenolan.net 

Photographic Images by Aoife Giles.