3 - 29 August 2018

This exhibition is part of the first Linen Biennale Northern Ireland, a celebration of the past, present and future of Europe’s oldest textile.

Featuring artists: Christine Mauersberger, Mylène Boisvert, Sandra Turley, Damian Magee and Jill Phillips.

Mylène Boisvert

1. Col #4 - 2017

Col #4 is part of The Linen Seasons a collection of works made from textile paper, primarily linen, loosely inspired by antique lace. Kilometres of paper thread painstakingly produced by hand using a Japanese technique called kami-ito are used to create works installed on bases and hung on walls.

I like the idea that the flax fibre I use was originally a fabric that was subsequently turned into paper, which I once again transform into thread. I then use that thread to construct large works. The designs are drawn on my studio wall using linen paper just like I would do with a marker. Some of the works also incorporate papers made from abaca, cotton or Japanese mulberry as well as flax fibre. Taking my inspiration from the rich history of textiles, I create textile constructions based on a personalized language and gestural expression.

Sandra Turley

2. Weavers - 2018

3. Spinners and Doffers - 1998

Sandra Turley is a textile artist specialising in printed textiles, book art and site-specific installations. Her work frequently addresses issues of place, community and identity. By working to a particular theme her work progresses through numerous pathways, experiments, academic research and processes. "For me the journey must always be exciting and not limited by end results so that the element of chance and accidental discoveries keeps work alive"

Weavers is a reflection on women's work. I had been drawn to a large, handwritten ledger (1927/28) held in Craigavon Museum Services containing the names of weavers, both men and women. The names appear relentlessly repeated over the weeks with female weavers' names written in red ink. With red thread I trace the journey of the pen across the page and reflect upon the passage of time. As I study each name not only do I think of this woman and her work but also the male clerk who documented and calculated the wages. As I work, the newsreader reminds me that it is fifty years since the Ford sewing machinists went on strike in Dagenham.

Spinners and Doffers. Artist's book containing the memories of millworkers in 1998 and images of Gilford Mill.

Christine Mauersberger

 4. The Plastic Holds No Water - 2017

This work was made as a result of my concern about plastic pollution found in our oceans. Most of this trash cannot be seen because it is so tiny that it is invisible to the human eye but is floating just beneath the water’s surface. Marine wildlife ingests these plastics and its effects are long lasting and deadly. It is my intention to help to bring awareness to this threat.

To make this installation, I hand-dyed linen using indigo, then cut and machine-sewn it onto a base of tulle to create work that looks like a vista of water, upon closer inspection, one can see pieces of plastic.

Damian Magee

5. Weaving Record (with Punch) - 2018

The technologically sophisticated early hand looms utilised punch card for translating designs into binary code, making them proto-computers. In the 1960’s magnetic tape gradually replaced punch cards as the primary medium for storing computer data. Today, only the last of the master weavers retain the historical knowledge and idiosyncratic computational and engineering skills required to operate these looms.

Working in collaboration with one of the only remaining master damask linen weavers in the island of Ireland, with unique access to a loom granted by the Irish Linen Centre, we endeavoured to weave cassette tape as a means to record the weaving process. The tape preserves its original function as a recording medium by existing as a document of its own transformation from line into form. Foregrounding the relationship between material, weaver and loom, all mechanical and gestural processes that embody the legacy of the linen industry disappear into the cloth. Meanwhile, the punched out card that formulate the zero’s or one’s of new linen designs continue to accrue as physical by-products. Fusing archaic mediums with similarly archaic technologies, complex historical narratives unfold through culturally encoded materials and industrial processes. 

Jill Phillips

6. Different Buses - 2009

Going to school in Northern Ireland meant taking a different bus to my catholic neighbours. Like many in my generation I have steered away from anything political due to an inherent discomfort with our shared situation. Using imagery to transform a selection of bus seats into something new giving us a visual imagery that we are one. Screen-printed and laser-etched on natural linen the work uses colour to confuse and unbrand each school, to twist things up and allowing them to become more united.

7. Niamh - 2009

8. Caoimhe - 2009 (8)

9. Keela - 2009 (9)

Exploring the strength and importance of our botanical plant life compared to the fragility of the natural system and the individual plant cycle. Using the delicacy and flow of botanical form as an influence; combining them with the rigidity and strength of the internal system of the plants, the final piece aims to display these juxtapositions through geometry, texture and colour. The imagery encourages the evolving play between the rigidity of geometry and the delicate nature of plant form. Organic geometry initially does not allow us to think of beauty and form, initially we think we will loose the delicate form, colour and visual exquisiteness of the imagery. Utilizing the combination of linen fabric elegantly embellished with embroidery completing the piece with a precision application of laser cutting expressing the fragility. Appreciating the balance, which subtly exists reflecting the exploration of our botanical eco system.

Exhibition statement (490 words) 3.5.2018

Sketching!

I’ve been a sketcher for years.  It started with a really bad back during my last term at school - a slipped disc, which required me to spend three months lying on my tummy in bed – and in that year’s family summer holiday I wasn’t allowed to play tennis or golf, or even to walk much:  what to do ?

My father (Dr Robert Hadden, a GP in Portadown) had painted a bit in his youth. He unearthed his ancient set of oil paints, and so I started art instead of sport. It wasn’t long before I switched to watercolours: not so sticky or smelly, and much lighter to carry around.

I didn’t go to art college, but I did take every chance I could to join in evening classes etc. Working for over 30 years with the John Lewis Partnership in central London, I was lucky enough to tenjoy some wonderful holiday courses run by the Royal Watercolour Society. As I only had time for art in the holidays – not like my  patchwork or crochet projects, which could be fitted into winter evenings – I mostly sketched my holiday scenes. At first I took quite a few  photographs too, to capture a ‘true record’  for copying at home; but later I realised that the sketch itself is the record, and can show so much more of the spirit of the place and the day than any photograph.

Years later, in 1985, I qualified for the Partnership’s Long Service Leave – and spent a happy six months travelling round the world, with two sketchbooks and the smallest possible set of gear - including this time a folding  stool, which enables you to sketch in comfort anywhere (no easel needed, just  your knees).

Eventually I retired and came home to Portadown, where I’ve been glad to play a part in two local art clubs – the Armagh Art Club, where for 17 years I was Treasurer, and the Portadown Visual Arts Society, based here at Millennium Court, for all of whose 20 years I was Secretary. There was time then for some ‘proper’ paintings to show in Club exhibitions, and some of those have sold, which is always a thrill - but I still love sketching best.

This exhibition brings together elements of Hamilton’s innovative practice, which crosses the lines between object, digital interaction and action/performance. Sound, both incidental and composed, underpins her works like a fourth dimension. The exhibition features a more expansive re-interpretation of her work to date with an emphasis on works that excavate and frustrate the function and appearance of objects and materials. ‘Semblance and Event’ seeks to draw together old and new works that will bring into dialogue stark and austere examinations of materials and matter with processes of making that resemble ascetic practices of repetition. Through this, Hamilton seeks to untangle meaning in the everyday whilst simultaneously ingraining in her works an embodied reinterpretation that bring forth often unnoticed aspects of lived experience into visibility.

 This is the second of two successive solo exhibitions, the first of which took place at The Agency Gallery, London (17th Feb - 1st April 2018).

http://www.helenahamilton.com/

Opening: Friday 2 February, 7-9pm

Continues: 3 February - 28 March 2018

Artist Talk: Saturday 17 February, 12-1pm

Artist Master class: 24 February, 10-4pm

Components of the Scene

by Brian McAvera

In 1966 the writer Ronald Blythe published an anthology of stories, poems and essays on the Second World War called Components of the Scene. He was trying to give an overview of the war from the points of view of professional writers, but his title acknowledged that the individual component parts were capable of being re-assembled in many different ways, and therefore capable of creating many different ‘Scenes’.

You, the audience, are currently looking at an exhibition by Sinead McKeever called Antenna. Although it has a number of familiar component parts, such as the large charcoal drawings, it is not like an exhibition produced by, for example, a painter, in which every work has a life of its own and can be separated from every other work on the walls. With McKeever’s work it is the totality of the parts that is important, as she is creating an Installation which responds to the physical structure of the gallery, not only in terms of the length, breadth and height of its two main rooms (the walls and the floor) but also in terms of the complicated physical construction of its ceiling.

Unlike you, the reader, this writer, at the time of writing, has not seen the Installation because it has not yet been constructed. What he has seen are the component parts, charcoal drawings on the studio walls, sketchbook plans which may or may not be followed, smaller drawings and paintings on small pieces of dibond, and, made from the same substance, a sculptural installational piece, currently inhabiting the corridor outside of the studio, where, starting at the top of a doorframe, it bends and twists through space before diagonally thrusting downwards to the floor. So, if the component parts both actual, and probable (what the artist is intending to do), are outlined, in a very real sense you, the viewer, can peek over the artist’s shoulder and look at the creative process: you can observe how she has used the component parts, where she has put them, how she has adapted them to the physical aspects of the galleries and – if you think of the whole installation as being like a journey – how she controls the way in which you move through the galleries.

So, what is the plan? Well, as currently envisaged Gallery 2, the smaller space, will have six large charcoal drawings (H 1530mm x W 1220mm) as well as a number of smaller drawings and paintings which are on dibond. There will be a globe, mounted on an easel, but if you touch it you will get powder on your fingers. There is likely to be a pigment work, possibly also using dibond, which might start on the wall and then shift to the floor but if you walk through it, you will get powder on your shoes and leave footprints on the floor.

At this point you might think of the title: Antenna.  In 1907, in Galway, Marconi created the first commercial, transatlantic radio signal connecting Europe and North America. So, we are in the world of communications. If you look at the charcoal drawings, there are circular elements (Globes? Satellites?) and very strong suggestions of outer space, perhaps of electrons or atoms whirring through. If you look closely at the small drawings you will find strips of transparent cellotape, suggestive of antennae, and of rays emanating from antennae.

Shift now into the main room, Room 1, with its complex ceiling structure. The artist started with eight sheets of dibond (H 2440mm x W 1220mm)  and two sheets (H 3050mm x W 1250mm)   of the same substance. Dibond is a shiny, reflective, aluminium composite made from two layers of the metal with a plastic centre in-between. McKeever cuts these sheets into strips, thinner ones between 23 and 25 mm and thicker ones between 58 and 62 mm, which she can bend and twist. She connects them with butterfly ‘wing’ nuts. As the wing nuts project outwards, they are nodal points for the attraction and reflection of light. The already-mentioned work that was in the corridor outside the artist’s studio will be in this room, and there will be at least one other similar piece, probably a mirror image of this one, though it might reside on the floor as opposed to coming off a wall. If it is on the floor, stand as close as possible and look directly downwards. Two things happen simultaneously: the ceiling is reflected in the strips, but projected onto the floor. It’s as if you are looking downwards into a pit.

You might also look at whether the artist has decided to heighten the perceptual oddities, and indeed the perpetual uncertainties, by using lighting. Will the dibond sculptural pieces be backlit for example? What kind of shadows are created? How are the reflections (including your own) utilised? You are not just walking around an exhibition: you are in it. It is immersive, and this might lead you to ask yourself about boundaries. Where does something start? Where does it encroach upon something else? Where does it finish? You are navigating the room, not just standing in the middle and observing the sequencing.

You might also ask yourself why the artist uses the somewhat unlikely material of dibond. It’s an industrial material with connotations of coolness and formality. But because of its reflective properties, which can be heightened by a careful use of lighting, at the moment we approach it we ourselves are now locked into its imagery. So, unless the artist has opted for second thoughts and introduced something unexpected, you are now in possession of all of the component parts: the globe, the charcoal drawings, the small drawings and paintings, the pigment piece, and the large dibond sculptural works. How has she put them together? How has she responded to the physical properties of the spaces? How has she decided to light each and every element? How has she used shadows? Why is there so little colour? How has she created a pathway through the installation for you to observe? One great thing about writing an essay before seeing the finished exhibition: I don’t have to answer the questions! But you can…..

Opening: Friday 1 December, 7-9pm

Continues: 2 December 2017 - 24 January 2018

Artist Talk: Saturday 9

December, 12-1pm

Artist Master class: 16 December, 10-4pm

A Free Bus will run between Belfast and Portadown on the evening of the opening.Leaves Belfast from Golden Thread Gallery at 6.45pm. Returns from Portadown at 9pm

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present “Let the dead leaves fall”, a new solo exhibition by Miguel Martin.

In this exhibition of new work, Martin examines societal attitudes surrounding contemporary forms of mindfulness in a digital age, and questions its various associations to practices of occultism and worship. The title of the exhibition is adapted from a quote by the 13th century Persian poet and mystic Rumi, who originally wrote, “Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop”, alluding to ideas of letting go, shedding inner demons and thereby submitting oneself to higher

transcendental states of consciousness. Having been taught the practice of transcendental meditation (TM) himself at the age of 11, Martin combines influences from personal experience with research into narratives surrounding tropes of contemporary occultism such as gurus, garments and symbols. A personal choice to remove himself almost entirely from most social media platforms also led to an interest in alternative forms of engaging with the self and how that can benefit a stronger awareness of mental health.

Drawing aesthetic influences from minimalism, horror and still life, the tone of the exhibition is softly sinister and includes video, installation and sculptural components. Among these components include an industrially fabricated sign emblazoned with the words “Search inside yourself”, appropriated from the title of a mindfulness course developed at Google headquarters designed to improve employer productivity. Also featured in the exhibition is a slab of locally sourced black nero marquina marble cut and shaped to the proportions of a standard yoga mat, as well as a new series of still life drawings and a short video piece. Entitled “Downward dog not spiral” this video is an abstracted version of a YouTube yoga tutorial which charts the progress of a masked guru figure. Choreographed in a specific order the exhibition leads the audience to a bronze object, which forms the basis of Martin’s research surrounding symbolic and occult hand gestures.

Accompanying the show will be a booklet featuring a newly commissioned essay written by Brussels based Irish curator, artist and historian Padraic E.Moore, and a limited edition set of antique gold die struck pin badges which will also be on sale throughout the exhibition.

Miguel Martin (b. 1985 Belfast, UK) BA Fine and Applied Art at the University of Ulster, Belfast (2005 –2008) Lives in Belfast and works at Platform Arts, Belfast. Solo shows include: 2016 Put to the sword, CCA Derry-Londonderry; 2015 Curio, Ards Arts Centre; 2015 Out of Site, University Art Gallery, Belfast; 2011 All Good in the Manhood, Abrons Arts Centre, New York. Awards: 2015 Arts Council of Northern Ireland Artist’s Career Enhancement Scheme (ACES); 2012 and 2011 Arts Council of Northern Ireland Support for Individual Artist Award.

The first instalment launched at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast on the 3rd August 2017 and focused on Wilson’s more recent practice.

The second instalment, at the Millennium Court Art Centre, Portadown, 6th October – 22nd November 2017, features examples of work dating back to the early 1970s. 

Revealing links across various periods of production, Signs and Ciphers, an exhibition of works by Belfast-based artist Alistair Wilson, is broken into four parts and realised across two galleries.

Encompassing selected works spanning forty years of production, the exhibition does not set out to provide a definitive survey of Wilson’s work to date, rather this extended exhibition draws together key works in an attempt to bring to the fore the prevailing themes and common characteristics present in Wilson’s practice. This rare opportunity to experience such a substantial body of Wilson’s work creates an opportunity to delve into the formal and conceptual concerns and the tension for his work to conform to having a fixed state.

Opening: Friday 4 August, 7-9pm

Exhibition continues: 5 August – 27 September 2017

Artist Talk: Saturday 19 August, 12-1pm

A Free Bus will run between Belfast and Portadown on the evening of the opening. Leaves Belfast from Golden Thread Gallery at 6.45pm. Returns from Portadown at 9pm

‘(A) Dress’ is a significant exhibition of new work by glass artist Alison Lowry and will be part of the August Craft Month programme of activities across Northern Ireland.

With a family history in lace-making and embroidery, Alison studied textiles, then developed her skills in glass making in a variety of techniques. Inspired by her experiences of motherhood, Alison’s work captures small, but fleeting moments of life that are filled with memories, she says, “fabric preserves the essence of its maker; traces of the wearer become entwined with the warp and weft, allowing physical objects to become containers for memory.“ Glass allows her to replicate or capture an impression of cloth or clothing in a precise and immediate way. The nature of the glass piece embodies the fragility of the very memory it captures.  Frances McDonald writes, “Textiles may have provided the narrative…..powerfully expressed through the language of glass…strong and fragile, as well as being a poignant reminder of the vulnerability of life...”

The exhibition features exciting collaborations, a new film based on glass shoes and a large dress suspended from the ceiling, raining down droplets into the gallery. The exhibition opens on the 4th August and continues until the 27th of September.

The artist has used the technique of Pate de Verre to cast antique christening robes in the process, the original robe will be burnt away in the kiln but the glass will formed in its place – creating a fragile but haunting reminder of what was there before.

Alison Lowry is a glass artist living and working from her studio, ‘Schoolhouse Glass’ in Saintfield, Northern Ireland.

She graduated from the University of Ulster with a first class Honors degree in Art and Design in 2009. She employs a range of techniques to create her sculptures, working with cast glass and pate de verre.

She has won numerous awards including first place in the category, ‘Glass Art’ at the Royal Dublin Show in 2015 and 2009, the Silver medal at the Royal Ulster Arts Club’s Annual Exhibition in 2010, the Warm Glass Prize in 2010 and 2011 and more recently the Bronze Award at Bullseye Glass’ ‘Emerge’ exhibition.

Alison exhibits both locally and internationally and her work is held in several public collections; the National Museum of Ireland recently acquired a large pate de verre vessel for the ‘Contemporary Craft Collection’. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland have several of Alison's pieces in their collection.

Various Artists

Opening: Friday 23 June, 7-9pm

A Free Bus will run between Belfast and Portadown on the evening of the opening.Leaves Belfast from Golden Thread Gallery at 6.45pm. Returns from Portadown at 9pm

Exhibition continues: 24 June – 22 July 2017

Symposium: “Making A Living As A Ceramicist”

Friday 30 June, 12noon

A Creative Momentum event, presentation and discussion on how to make a living as a ceramicist, includes networking and lunch provided. This event is free of charge but registration is essential. To register please contact Niall Drew on 028 3831 2485 or Niall.Drew@ArmaghBanbridgeCraigavon.gov.uk

Ceramics and its Dimensions is a project which examines European ceramics from the perspectives of the past as well as of the future, with its new possibilities. The project has partner institutions in eleven different countries in Europe and it is co-funded through the Creative Europe program of EU and coordinated by the Porzellanikon Staatliches Museum für Porzellan, Hohenberg a. d. Eger / Selb.

Ceramics and its Dimensions: Shaping the Future (Module 6) is one of the ten modules (sub-projects) of the project and led by Aalto University, School of Art, Design and Architecture, Department of Design, Helsinki, Finland. The sub-project consists of a workshop, a touring exhibition and a publication. It has been co-funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.

For more information on the project visit: futureceramics.aalto.fi

Or check out the Facebook page: www.facebook.com/ShapingTheFutureCeramics/

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, 'Ceramics and its Dimensions - Shaping the Future':

Foreword & Introduction

Ceramics is a natural product. The raw materials, such as clay, kaolin sand, feldspar, quartz and other minerals, are taken from the ground. People have known this for thousands and thousands of years, and they have taken advantage of the special characteristics of ceramics as a material: that is, its persistence, loading capacity, waterproofness and chemical and bacterial resistance. Throughout history, ceramics has played an important role in the development of different kind of societies all around the world, influencing the way people have built their houses, lived their lives and eaten their food.

The European project Ceramics and its Dimensions seeks to be a part of the rediscovering of the role of ceramics and the bringing forth of the knowledge of the heritage and the different traditions of the use of ceramics. This ambitious project has connected museums, architects, designers, industry and stakeholders from different European countries to explore ceramics according to its cultural, historical, technical and artistic aspects. The project is supported by the EU Programme Creative Europe, and it brings together twenty-five partner institutions from eleven European countries: research institutes that are exploring for the new ceramic materials and new ways to use the already known materials; factories that provide a platform for realising the objects that the new generation of designers have in mind; museums that on the one hand preserve the knowledge of our heritage and on the other hand support our evolving contemporary culture by presenting their collection items as a source for inspiration; and universities that educate visionary actors in the field of art and design who have the capacity and passion to grasp the complex challenges that the twenty-first century entails.

Within the project, there are ten separate modules that focus on diverse aspects of ceramics. Each of the modules uses their own way to explore, discuss, show and share their specific topics. For example, the module European Cultural Lifestyle in Ceramics – from Baroque until today constitutes a touring exhibition that presents some carefully selected items which mirror the history of ceramics in the European lifestyle from the Baroque period to the present. Then the module Architectural Ceramics in Europe uses the form of a database to present some extraordinary buildings in European history. It highlights the fact that ceramics is not an insignificant building material but in fact one which has in many cases improved the quality of architecture significantly. The module Prop ceramics – ceramics in movies and advertisements takes a retrospective view of the socio-cultural background of the use of ceramics in films.

On the other hand the module Ceramics – what it means to me brings us to the question of how to use ceramics for improving the living conditions of people and how to make sure that ceramic products are sustainable. It also tackles the fundamental question of how we can create ceramic pieces that are produced in large quantities yet at the same time feel personal. To support the challenges for the upcoming generation, the Future Lights module and competition is targeted at young designers who have just started their careers. The module provides a chance for the selected participants to promote their career as designers and ceramicists. Another module in which the new generation of artists and designers are provided an opportunity to explore the future through ceramic material concretely is Shaping the Future – Ceramic Development and Tomorrow’s Design. Right now, you are handling the publication that will discuss and show in detail how the module is in fact shaping the very future!

Wilhelm Siemen

Director Porzellanikon Staatliches Museum für Porzellan, Selb, Germany, Head Ceramics and its Dimensions project

CHRYSALIS: Southern Regional College

Opening: Thursday 1 June 2017, 7-9pm, Gallery 1 & 2

The opening of Southern Regional College's annual end of year Exhibition for Graphic Design HND, Photography HND and Digital Imagery Degree at Millennium Court Arts Centre.

SRC continues 2 June - 17 June 2017

Portadown Visual Arts Society's 15th Annual Summer Exhibition

Opening: Thursday 1 June 2017, 7-9pm, Gallery 2

MCAC is delighted to host the fifteenth annual summer exhibition by Portadown Visual Arts Society (PVAS), a local art group who are major stakeholders in the Centre. The exhibition creates another step in providing artistic opportunities for the members in a professional setting. The work, which draws great interest from the local area, will continue to develop ties between MCAC and local practicing artists.

PVAS continues 2 June - 24 June 2017

Opening Friday 7 April, 7-9pm

8 April - 24 May 2017

Artist Talk: Saturday 8 April, 1-2pm

A Free Bus will run between Belfast and Portadown on the evening of the opening. Leaves Belfast from Golden Thread Gallery at 6.45pm. Returns from Portadown at 9pm.

What happens when democratic processes express, even produce, social and political divisions?  How are the outcomes of such processes – sometimes only narrowly won - resisted and critiqued?  How moreover, do such processes make use of visual-cultural means to, as the writer Rebecca Solnit puts it: ‘make injury visible’?  As a spectacle of resistance, public protest has a long history, but persists as a powerful form of expression in a time of conflict and instant, ‘citizen enabled’ global media.

Drawing on over a decade of image-making and research on themes of protest and urban space, Irish artist Joy Gerrard archives and painstakingly remakes media-borne crowd images from around the world.  Her Millennium Court Arts Centre exhibition marks the latest development in this project, presenting an abstract film work alongside monochrome paintings and drawings of the Arab risings of 2011, anti-Trump demonstrations and ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests from 2016. Her crowds are viewed from above, suggesting the remove of media observation, while the fluidity and drama of their moment is expressed through precise, expressive mark-making. The large paintings allow a shift in scale, disrupting the photographic schema of the smaller drawings, thus allowing greater freedom from the original mediation of the image. These are set alongside the film ‘shot crowd’, produced as a small maquette in 2007 and remade in 2016. Here, Gerrard sets the historical specificity of her protest images against an abstract depiction of space and human movement. The perpetual flow of individual objects, apparently random and chaotic, is constrained and directed within a built environment.

The elemental simplicity of Gerrard’s Japanese ink drawings and paintings belies a more complex meditation on the contemporary circulation of images, the precarious freedom of protest and the contemporary relation between populism and representative democracy. In her work, the figure of the crowd comes to suggest the expression of collective agency. But these crowds are persistently contained within historical architectures that at once give them form and constrain them.  The ephemeral imagery of news media is thus figured against more fundamental and enduring human conditions, while the rescaling of images into dramatic, painterly forms disrupts their everyday meaning to provoke reflection on the place of art, witnessing and the politics of representation.

Rhona Byrne, Mitch Conlon, Harrell Fletcher, IM Heung-soon, J Ross & Sons 

Curated by Alissa Kleist

You and I is a group exhibition curated by Alissa Kleist that includes new and existing video, sculptural, installation, and event-based works by Rhona Byrne, Mitch Conlon, Harrell Fletcher, IM Heung-soon, and J Ross & Sons. The exhibition examines the social, political and formal functions of art at a time when individualisation, capitalism, neoliberalism, and privatisation –which benefit few, whilst disadvantaging and alienating many others – hegemonise our society. You and I features artworks that emphasise the role the artist in making visible and questioning these systems, and propose counterstrategies to address their effects.

In the film Factory Complex, South Korean artist IM Heung-soon gives voice to the often-invisible marginalized female labourers whose lives have been affected by the demands of a growing global economy. Through the stories of women working in the South Korean textile industry in the 1960’s and those of contemporary precarious workers, he examines the historic evolution and impact of a deregulated labour market and drastic economic development.

J Ross & Sons’ sculptural installations explore the ‘useful object’ and suggest alternative uses for, and interactions with, architecture and place. The work commissioned for You and I proposes another way to navigate the urban topography of Portadown, questioning how art objects can highlight the visible and invisible tensions present within – and potentially interrupt the official management of – public space.

Dublin based artist Rhona Byrne’s social sculptures encourage their users to engage in collective activity. Huddlewear, a series of wearable artworks/social garments, allow visitors to inhabit new communal spaces where shared experiences can take place. On 25 March, Byrne will lead a collaborative Speed Moaning workshop at MCAC where participants can explore the productive potential of anxiety/negativity.

Together with Jay, the owner of a garage in central Portland, and his employees and customers, US based artist Harrell Fletcher created Blot Out The Sun; a conceptual re-working of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The work includes lines from the novel that contemplate the human condition, social inequality, and the relationship between individuals and the universe.

Places where men go to die, a new collective performance choreographed by Mitch Conlon, explores the spaces and temporalities where individual and collective narratives can co-exist and from which new communities emerge. His research includes how cities and people are rebuilt after a crisis; the theatrics of public gatherings such as carnivals and football matches; and the applications of humour, absurdity and subversion. Places where men come to die will launch at the opening of You and I on Friday 17 February at 8pm.

On Saturday 25 March, You and I curator Alissa Kleist will give a guided gallery tour (12noon –1pm) of the exhibition, followed by a Speed Moaning workshop (2pm – 4pm) presented by artist Rhona Byrne.

Events are free and all are welcome to attend. Please contact johnny@millenniumcourt.org to book a place.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a new publication, ‘Unseen By My Open Eyes’ by Black Dog Publishing, London.

Unseen by my Open Eyes features four films that explore the construction, projection and manipulation of identity. The focus of the exhibition is A Numbness in the Mouth, a 17 minute vision of a self- sustaining, militarised Ireland where food production and consumption is kept in balance. Created with a Sky Academy Arts Scholarship, A Numbness in the Mouth was filmed on location in a nineteenth-century water-powered flour mill in Dublin. It explores our relationship to the production and consumption of food in a series of staged scenes, monologues and analogies. Interpolated into the film is an infomercial from the 1950’s of a mother baking bread for her children. The two performers inhabit familiar roles and images of women in television which begin to unravel as they reflect on how food affects their temperament, bathe in a vat of orange jelly and sift flour onto their own heads.    

In The Mirror is Dark and Inky, daily life in Iran is interrupted by a whale living in a bathtub. Our Stranded Friends in Distant Lands reflects on geographic, political and emotional separations in South Korea. Everything Disappears explores selfhood, relationships and military conscription in Taiwan. Each film is shot in the prevalent or native tongue of the country in which the film was shot, with participants from Iran, Taiwan and South Korea performing the roles.

Kevin Gaffney (b 1987, Dublin) is a visual artist working in film. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2011 with an MA Photography and Moving Image, and was awarded the first Sky Academy Arts Scholarship for an Irish artist in 2015. He was an UNESCO-Aschberg laureate artist in residence at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Changdong Residency in South Korea (2014); received a Film Project Award from the Arts Council of Ireland for the creation of a new film while artist in residence at the Taipei Artist Village in Taiwan (2014); and received the Kooshk Artist Residency Award to create a new film in Iran (2015).

His work is part of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s collection and has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally, including: European Media Art Festival (Germany, 2016); Out There, Thataway at CCA Derry~Londonderry (2015); the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Scotland, 2015); and We at Catalyst Arts (Belfast, 2012). Solo exhibitions include: CAI02 Contemporary Art Institute (Japan, 2014); the Linenhall Arts Centre (Ireland, 2016); and the Galway Arts Centre (Ireland, 2013).

A free bus will run between Dublin and Portadown on the evening of the opening. The bus will be leaving from the RHA at 4:30 on Friday 2nd of December and returning at 9pm from Portadown. For more information and to book your place contact lisa@millenniumcourt.org

The Second Law of Thermodynamics States that whenever energy is transformed from one form to another form, entropy increases and energy decreases. 

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present Another Day in Futile Battle Against the 2nd Law, a new body of work by Aisling O’Beirn. 

The work for this exhibition falls under the 2nd law. It consists of a sculptural installation and some new animations pieces, all of which explore in different ways how a lay-person struggles to understand scientific concepts. It has been made with the support of Armagh Observatory and Planetarium.  The installation explores stellar distances by spatially imagining the constellation the Great Bear, using precariously balanced and placed found objects.  The animation Overwhelming (Meteor Showers) is a reflection on time and the nature of predictable and unpredictable events.  The animation, Slices of Time (some questions), tracks conversations on subjects ranging from infinity, inflation the big bang and stellar distributions with astronomer Simon Jeffery.

With special thanks to Emeritus Prof. Mark Bailey and to Simon Jeffery of Armagh Observatory.

Public Talk: "Earth's Place in Space: Discovering Humanity's Shared Celestial Heritage" by Professor Mark E. Bailey, Emeritus Director of Armagh Observatory Friday28 October, 11-12 noon. For more information contact lisa@millenniumcourt.org / jackie@millenniumcourt.org 

About: Aisling O’ Beirn is an artist based in Belfast whose current sculptural work is concerned with exploring space as a physical structure and a political entity by making and animating forms relating to observed and theoretical structures being studied by contemporary astronomers and physicists. Projects have investigated ideas around entropy order, disorder and balance and how laypersons try to understand scientific and mathematical ideas.  Recent work has been facilitated by Armagh Observatory and Dunsink Observatory.  O'Beirne has exhibited nationally and internationally. She was included in Northern Ireland’s first participation in the 51st Venice Biennale. Her work manifests variously as sculpture, installation, animation and site-specific projects.

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Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present Once Removed, the first solo exhibition in Ireland by Irish visual artist Ian Cumberland. Cumberland is known for his stunning large oil paintings, particularly his award winning ‘heads’ and has been awarded the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s ACES funding for the development of this new body of work.  

Once Removed is a modern day tale of consumerist alienation and the ‘society of the spectacle’ where authentic social life is replaced with its representation leaving little beneath, a process that has accelerated in the age of social media and selfies. The painted works ruminate on the individual, their understanding of self, and the disparity between appearance and reality. To do this Cumberland produces tightly framed magnified, fleshy faces (‘heads’) that meet the viewer’s eye and works depicting solitary figures confined in a series of uncanny domestic spaces. Instances of the surreal punctuate the work. 

The beautiful, youthful figures of Cumberland’s cast appear fixated on superficial attractiveness. They exude glamour but their perfection is belied by a mottled complexion and malaise. Some appear at a remove, reflected in mirrors, which have a long association in art history, not least as indicators of the illusory nature of painting itself, but also vanity, and in the mid twentieth century, psychoanalytic self-recognition. Even the surreal black holes that absorb the pictured inhabitants are mirrored, like the surface of smart phones or tablets. These scenes possess a hallucinatory stillness and are heightened by the artist’s vivid use of colour and attention to detail – in fabrics and carpets. 

Cumberland’s paintings are technically brilliant and realistic in style. The painted surface performs a sort of alchemy that transcends the photographic source material, making this symbolic depiction of the contemporary condition more, not less believable and absorbing. Cumberland also explores painting’s mode of presentation through complex installations as well as producing new sculptural installations (including the recurring black hole motif) that mark a departure into three-dimensional work.

About the artist: Ian Cumberland (b. 1983) is an Irish Visual Artist. He studied Fine Art at the University of Ulster, Belfast where he was awarded the John and Rachael Turner Award for the most outstanding student in their field. Cumberland has gained a national and international reputation for his large scale award-winning ‘head’ paintings. In 2010 he won the Davy Portrait Award, in 2011 he was placed third in the prestigious BP Portrait Award as well as winning the Ireland-US Council and Irish Arts Review Portraiture Award at the Royal Hibernian Academy. http://www.iancumberland.com/works/portfolio/

X-Ray Audio, Nadège Mériau, Mhairi Sutherland, Fiona Hession, Siobhan Mcgibbon, John Smith
Curated by Gregory McCartney
Accompanied by the publication Abridged 0-45: Why is it Always December?

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present ‘Why is it always December?’ curated by Gregory McCartney and featuring work from X-Ray Audio (Stephen Coates and Paul Heartfield), Nadège Mériau, Mhairi Sutherland, Fiona Hession, Siobhan Mcgibbon and John Smith.

The exhibition takes its title from a 1980s One Thousand Violins song in which one of its lines is, ‘If I has dreams, well I bet they’d be bad dreams.’ Of the impetus behind the exhibition curator Gregory McCartney says, 
 “The Eighties was a hangover of a decade. The hopes of the Sixties had come to nothing. Punk was over and everything was violent, grey and Thatcherite. Growing up in 1980s Northern Ireland everyone had a religion and no-one had a job. If you ‘weren’t into’ the politics that was ascribed to you, you buried yourself in cheap cans of Steiger, got a haircut that would mark you out as kick-in-able (by both sides of the divide) and listened to loads of music. At the back of your mind there was also a realisation, what with the Falklands War, Regan’s Star Wars project and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that we were potentially five minutes away from a nuclear apocalypse.”

The work has its own very different emphasis. The fascinating X-Ray Project explores how Russians, in the period where Western records were banned and listening to them was dangerous, ingeniously still managed to hear the outlawed music; there are still parts of the world where listening to music is punishable by imprisonment and worse. Mhairi Sutherland explores ‘remote viewing’ in which both the USSR and USA used psychics to discover secrets from each other. In Nadege Meriau’s microscopic Little Deaths the familiar is turned into something threatening and dangerous, but beautiful. Siobhan McGibbon exposes the monsters just beyond the edge of sight. Fiona Hession’s Black Holes draw us into ourselves and John Smith recreates a portion of Eliot’s The Wasteland in a bar; both compelling and poetically beautiful.

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present Kaleid, a new body of work by Belfast based graphic designer Keith Connolly. 

Connolly’s artistic practice plays with the visual expectations of geometric forms found within science and nature. In this show he explores the possibilities of delicate incremental changes to algorithms and number sequences. Kaleid presents seemingly complex geometric forms that have been realised from simple mathematical beginnings. 

Wherein his previous works have concentrated on two-dimensional drawings this show will see moving image and sculptural elements produced in collaboration with fellow minimalist artists.

This exhibition is supported by funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland - National Lottery and Armagh City, Banbridge & Craigavon Borough Council.

Artist Talk: Saturday 16 January, 2-3PM
Symposium: Thursday 21 January

MCAC is delighted to present ‘Exhuming the Archive’ a new solo exhibition by Belfast based artist Jiann Hughes. An ode to the digital memories we’d rather forget, this new body of work considers the earth as planetary memory storage, containing the haunting remains of dead new media. The installations that Hughes has created memorialise the unstable materials relied upon for today’s memory making. They are kinetic and living monuments to the invisible labours and persistent materials that support our remembering: to the stuff that resists decay, refuses to be forgotten, and refuses to let us forget.

This exhibition follows recent work in which she exploited computer code to address the ubiquitous data mining processes of our biocapitalist sensor society. Through these new works Jiann continues to open up the black-boxes of digital technologies to reveal the structures, practices, and materials within our contemporary media ecologies. She strips away the rhetoric that claims a dematerialisation of digital archives to reconfigure the matter of our electronically-aided memories.

Drawing from the earth’s archive as the great bank of relics defying dissolution, Hughes imagines herself as part sculptor, part future archaeologist. She practices a geology of media; just as sculptors draw their material from the earth to study processes of changes and archaeologists may eventually unearth the residue of contemporary culture. Through this practice she explores how media history conflates with earth history: how materials get deterritorialised from their geological strata to be reterritorialised in machines before being returned to the earth marked obsolete. The exhibition toys with the temporal scales of digitality, Jurassic times are re-membered while contemporary times expand across future temporalities. This folding of geological time onto itself is defined by the mineral deposits of our ancestors, the growing piles of networked digital devices that have been made to break, and the plastiglomerates and other new materials that are emerging. These new works suggest new relationships, responsibilities, and materialities, offering up potential future epochs now in the making.

The installations make use of accumulated excess: the material residue from an over developed world. Using processes of poaching and gleaning Jiann works with these remains to awaken ghosts of the past. The work is shaped by the material practices of many bodies, from human hoarders to copper cabling to earthworms. It is executed with characteristic humour and uses methods of interference to gently but firmly expose slits of (im)possibility, otherwise obscured by accounts of technological progress or doom. It is a timely reflection on what comes to matter within the fantasy of the total archive. 

Jiann Hughes has been supported by ACES funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. MCAC is supported by Arts Council of Northern Ireland National Lottery Funding and Armagh City, Banbridge & Craigavon Borough Council funding.

A symposium will be held at MCAC, 21 January 2016 exploring the themes of the exhibition. 3 speakers will present including Dublin based writer Michael O’Rourke (who has published extensively on subjects including Queer Theory, Deconstruction, Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology, Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Feminist Theory).

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Born in Belfast, 1969, Jiann has a versatile practice that often takes shape through video, sound and performance and tends towards an exploration of what comes to matter in our knowledge making practices and entanglements with technology. Her artworks are often interactive or participatory, mostly relying on the materiality of digital technologies. A graduate from the Sydney Film School, Jiann has recently completed a PhD exploring her artworks at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia: titled ‘Speculative Fabulations for our Sensor Society’, her thesis draws attention to how biosensing and biometric technologies are shifting our experience of bodily boundaries, manifesting the contemporary human body as increasingly quantifiable, surveillable and controllable. She has received awards for her work including most recently; Artists Career Enhancement Schemes, Arts Council of Northern Ireland (2015); Individual Artist's Award, (2014). Her work has been exhibited in Australia, Hungary, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK.

http://jiannhughes.com/ 

Self Sufficient Life: A solo exhibition by Shiro Masuyama

Exhibition Opening: Friday 2 October, 7-9 pm*
3 October - 25 November
Artist Talk: Saturday 10 October, 2-3 pm

*Free Bus leaves Belfast (golden thread gallery) at 6.30pm on 2 October. Leaves Portadown (to return to Belfast) at 9pm. For more information or to book a place contact geraldine@millenniumcourt.org

A new 68 page publication coincides with the exhibition, with essays by Jun Yang and Slavka Sverakova.

***

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present ‘Self Sufficient Life’ a new solo exhibition by Shiro Masuyama.

This exhibition is the culmination of 3 international projects undertaken between 2012 and 2015 in Ireland, Peru and Mongolia documenting the artist’s search for self-sufficient models of living. He looks at the connections between farming animals for their wool/hair, the traditional place-specific techniques of producing fabric and clothing from these raw materials, and the cultures and societies in each of these different geographical contexts. The locations and landscapes in this series of works vary wildly, between rural Ireland to rural Peru and Mongolia which present more remote and self-sufficient environments. In each place the artist learns to shear an animal – sheep in Ireland, alpaca in Peru and camels in Mongolia – attempts to spin wool, knit and weave to produce an item of clothing or functional object.

Masuyama’s approach is collaborative and the work is shaped by the specific materials, skills, knowledge and energies of people in each place. The work is executed with characteristic humour and motivated by genuine inquiry. Ultimately the processes and dialogues involved in creating the three objects become central to each project.

Masuyama cites the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the resulting shockwaves through Japanese society and the implications of nuclear power for the future global energy landscape, both as prompting a significant shift in his own outlook and as a catalyst for this project, and its central theme of self sufficiency.

‘Self Sufficient Life’ is supported by funding from Arts Council of Northern Ireland National Lottery Funding; Armagh City, Banbridge & Craigavon Borough Council; and The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. The publication is supported through funding from the Japan Foundation.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Born in Tokyo, 1971, Shiro Masuyama has been based in Belfast since 2010. His work ranges from performance to sculpture, installation, photography and video and tends towards themes of people, society and place. Since 2002 he has worked nomadically, taking part in numerous international residencies including MMCA - National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, The National Art Studio Goyang (2008) ; IMMA - Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2006) ; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2004-2005) and ISCP - International Studio and Curatorial Programme, New York. He has received awards for his work including most recently; General Arts Awards, Arts Council of Northern Ireland (2014); Individual Artist's Award, Derry-Londonderry City of Culture (2013). He has exhibited work in many group exhibitions including "Aichi Triennale 2013”, Nagoya, Japan and solo exhibitions at numerous international venues including Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, Ireland (2014); Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton (2012); Gallery αM, Tokyo (2011); Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2011).  He has just completed a public art commission entitled “Five Apples” in Ballymena, Northern Ireland (2015).

31 July - 23 September 2015 | Opening Thursday 30 July, 7-9 PM

Artist Talk: Saturday 15 August, 2-3 PM. More info here

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present Ontogeny, an exhibition of new ceramic vessels by Sara Flynn. Flynn’s work concentrates on the challenges of thrown forms, which are then altered and changed at varying stages of the drying process, producing Sculptural Decorative Vessels. In essence, the work deals with a love for the process of throwing, an on-going relationship with porcelain and a fascination with the theme of the vessel, in both literal and abstracted interpretations.

Having begun her career producing small-scale functional pots, she has moved entirely into making one-off vessels, which are purely sculptural in their intent. Increasingly the main elements feeding the development of the work are Process and Finish; coupled with constant exploration and a deepening understanding of Form and Volume.

"My making-environment offers the solitude of a private, quiet studio which offers a space for great focus: and allows me to ‘play’. This risk-taking (making pieces which are exploring something new but are in themselves unsuccessful aesthetic objects) is fundamental to my practice. Without this research stage the new, exciting and successful pieces could not result. It is a labour of love and admitted-obsession.”

About the artist: Flynn trained in ceramic design at Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork, Ireland and established her own studio in Kinsale in 2000, and then in Leap, West Cork in 2006. She currently divides her time between West Cork and Belfast. Her work has to date focused exclusively on thrown and altered porcelain. All work is fired in a gas kiln (reduction) to between 1240 -1280° centigrade, offering a variety of colours and finishes ranging from complex blacks, warm and vibrant yellows to cool and subtle celadon-greens and whites.

Image Credits: Photography, Glenn Norwood

Whitewash XII: Live Urban Art Event featuring ADW AIDANKELLY DEBUT DRE DMC GARYREALROWE JMK LEBAS MORGAN TOMMYGUNN VENTS

Lurgan-based artist DMC presents Whitewash XII at Millennium Court Arts Centre on Friday 10 July 2015. This is the 12th instalment in the Whitewash series of Live Urban Art events curated by DMC. Started at MCAC in July 2010 the event has been held at various indoor and outdoor locations ever since, and has showcased a large number of practicing street artists. 

This time Whitewash XII brings together 11 street artists based in Ireland North and South, ranging from established names to younger artists. Taking place in MCAC’s Gallery 1 the event will see the 11 invited artists produce new works, live, in the space of one evening, while audience are free to move around, watch and contribute to a public mash wall.

Music is provided by returning DJ, Spliff Richards. The work will be on show at MCAC on 11th July and from 21-25th July. This event is for over 18s only. The exhibition is open to all.

Exhibition runs 9-30 May

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present Introducing Brian, a film by Nicholas Keogh based on stories by Brian Brown, (2015). This is the second time that Keogh has worked with Belfast based actor Brian Brown, previously collaborating with him in critically acclaimed A Removal’s Job (2013) (chosen by Dylan Cave (BFI) as one of the standout films at the Encounters Film Festival, 2013.) 

Introducing Brian is a curious blend of wildlife documentary, alleyway travelogue, sitcom, and drama, based on stories by Brian Brown. At its heart Introducing Brian celebrates storytelling. These stories are built on dark foundations adding pathos to moments of humour and poignancy to the philosophical and positive attitude of the central character. Dramatic sequences and narration performed with Brown’s vivid turn of phrase are woven together with beautifully shot footage of urban ecosystems.

Introducing Brian signifies a change in Keogh’s work, moving towards elements of narrative, but remaining consistent with the artist’s wider artistic practice in and outside of the gallery, which often “riotously interrupts”* the ordinary.

*Quoted from Declan Long, Belfast Reviews, in Art Forum, May 2014

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Nicholas Keogh (b. 1977) studied at the University of The West of England where he received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art in Context. Keogh lives and works in Belfast and is based at Lawrence Street Workshops. Keogh has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. He represented Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2005, was selected by CIRCA magazine to represent the Republic of Ireland at Experience Pommery #5 L’art en Europe 2008. His film ‘A Removals Job’ 2012 commissioned by the MAC Belfast as part of its opening program, received a Special Commendation at the Cork Film Festival in the best Irish short category, its U.K. screenings to date include the White Chapel Gallery, London and Encounters film festival Bristol. It has screened internationally at Union Docs New York and toured with FLAMIN in China and Japan.

March 2015

Millennium Court Arts Centre presents When the Wind Blows / 風が吹くとき, a cultural exchange between Fukushima, Japan and Portadown, Northern Ireland, curated by Japan based curator Yumi Song and Northern Ireland based artist and curator Shiro Masuyama. 

Featuring artists Ursula Burke (IE/NI), Zoë Murdoch (IE/NI), Shiro Masuyama (JP/NI), Chiharu Mizukawa (JP), Jun Kawada (JP), Kouichi Tabata (JP/DE), L＋ (HK), Nobuhiro Kuzuya (JP), Nyubo Abe (JP), Ryo Shimizu (JP), Satoru Aoyama(JP), Shingo Aruga (JP), Taihei (JP), Takashi Hokoi (JP), Tohru Matsushita (JP), Yuji Shimono (JP) and Arafudo Art Annual(JP)

For more information download Press Release

OPENING NIGHT RECEPTION & EXHIBITION DATES
Friday 13 March, from 7pm. Saturday 14 March – Saturday 2 May 2015

A FREE bus will run between Belfast and Portadown on the evening of the opening. Departs Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast to Portadown at 7pm. Departs Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown to Belfast at 9pm. FREE. Hop on or for more details contact geraldine@millenniumcourt.org

Special Thanks To Northern Ireland's Secret Nuclear Bunker Cold War Museum

YOUNG ADULT (or, a daring, urgent, malfunctioning age), Curated by Ben Crothers

Ian Charlesworth / Daniel Clowes / Brian Finke / Charles Forsman / Gilbert Hernandez / Dave Kiersh / Tao Lin / Michael Lucid / Mardou / Rebecca McIlwaine / Alasdair McLellan / Ryan Moffett / Erin Patrice O’Brien / Francis Pienaar / Noah Van Sciver / Charlie White

Exhibition runs 24 January - 28 February 2015

YOUNG ADULT opens on Friday 23 January from 7-9 pm. If you are travelling from Belfast there will be a FREE bus leaving from Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast at 7pm and returning to Belfast from Portadown at 8.45pm. For more details, directions or to reserve a space contact geraldine@millenniumcourt.org or call 02838394415.

YOUNG ADULT exposes and investigates youth culture gone wrong. Fun, boredom, alcohol, sex, parties, drugs, gangs, violence and death collide in a selection of video, photography, comic books and literature which straddles both sides of the Atlantic, exploring young adulthood in the UK and the United States, from Belfast and Manchester to New York and North Carolina. 

Focusing on work made about teenagers and twenty-somethings, YOUNG ADULT depicts those who seek solace in places where they perhaps should not, taking extreme measures to postpone adulthood and the difficulties which await them. Referred to as Millennials, Generation Y, “boomerang kids”, and the “Peter Pan generation”, their youth no longer presents hope and promise for the future, but rather crippling uncertainty.  Numbing themselves to a reality for which they were never prepared (despite, or indeed because of, their comfortable upbringings and college educations), rites of passage into adulthood are rejected as today’s young adults hurtle towards it, with potentially devastating consequences.

Whether presenting fact or fiction, the artists and writers featured within the exhibition recognise the complex problems facing young adults in contemporary society.  Some may blur or distort the truth, but even escapism ultimately leads back to reality.  The traditional process of growing up seems to have gone off course as contemporary youths face issues and challenges that did not exist, or were unacknowledged, in previous generations.  Young people are going back to school for lack of better options, travelling the world, avoiding commitments, competing for unpaid internships, and remaining unattached to romantic partners or permanent homes – in other words, forestalling the beginning of what many would consider "adult life”.  Frat boys under the influence of drugs and alcohol, teenage vandals, and internet-addicted, jobless graduates suffering from ennui are yet to find their place in the world, passively drifting through life or desperately seeking some form of respite, whether it is healthy or ultimately all the more damaging.

Creative Time Summit: 14th & 15th November

Coming up in November 2014

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow, a film by German artist Andrea Luka Zimmerman (winner of the 2014 Artangel Open award for her collaborative project Cycle with Andrian Jackson) as part of our special screening of the 2014 Creative Time Summit. 

Vision Machine Film Project: 'From today's menu, I recommend Capitalism or Cannibalism; Communism is off. Our Catholicism is rather good, though; it comes with a liberal sauce or tourist topping. This is our pre-theatre-of-poverty menu.

Meanwhile, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow grows over-rapidly large on a forced steroidal diet. Elsewhere, the cousins of The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow pluck and hack in feathered ecstasy over the carcass of a chicken too careless crossing the road. This bright and colourful scene is but a moment of a clamorous market economy busy with flies and children; industrious striped-potbellied pigs rummaging through heaps between houses half-sunk in muddy water, while villagers jump from stone to stone.

Cannibalism has long been a favourite on western menus. Other peoples' cannibalism, that is. More than a colonial culinary oddity, it divided the men from the animals; the savagery of the conquistadors was projected onto their victims - after all, they, too, sported feathers. Rumours of cannibalism persist in tourist guides and travel books today; some people still wear feathers (though most of them have long since died of influenza).

Specially bred with less feathers and more meat, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a film that dream-walks from the beaches of Mirtsdroy, where huge tourists, plucked and oiled, baste themselves standing up, to the muddy markets of Sumatra, via an archipelago of Export-Processing zones and television archives. Hand processed with bacterially cultured stock, the images are themselves in organic decay; all the coloursand forms of the scrap heap.

Between dream and nightmare, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a traversal of here and elsewhere, first and third world; a fairytale of production, resources, capitalism, globalisation, refuse and refusal: TheDelmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a film not about the struggle to be seen, but about the struggle to see.' 

Creative Time Summit: 14th & 15th November

Coming up in November 2014

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present Night Cleaners, a film by the Berwick Street Collective, as part of our special screening of the 2014 Creative Time Summit.

15 November - 10 January. Screening Times, Tuesday - Saturday (duration: 90mins), 10:15am, 12noon, 1.45pm, 3:30pm. MCAC opens at 10 am and closes 5pm.

Nightcleaners Part 1 was a documentary made by members of the Berwick Street Collective (Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan), about the campaign to unionize the women who cleaned office blocks at night and who were being victimized and underpaid. Intending at the outset to make a campaign film, the Collective was forced to turn to new forms in order to represent the forces at work between the cleaners, the Cleaner's Action Group and the unions - and the complex nature of the campaign itself. The result was an intensely self-reflexive film, which implicated both the filmmakers and the audience in the processes of precarious, invisible labour. It is increasingly recognised as a key work of the 1970s and as an important precursor, in both subject matter and form, to current political art practice.

"A film that places the nightcleaners' campaign within a series of broader political discussions formulated as an `open text' which asks as many questions about its own status as a film as it does about the socio-political issues that are its subject. No engaged person should overlook its challenge" (Tony Rayns, Time Out).

"A landmark work of British political cinema and of collective and feminist film-making" - Annette Kuhn

Nightcleaners Part 1 was originally conceived as the first of an ongoing series; material subsequently shot for Part 2 eventually became '36 to '77 (1978), a documentary focused on Myrtle Wardally who was a leader of the Cleaners' Action Group strike in Fulham. A new print of '36 to '77 is available from the British Film Institute (www.bfi.org.uk).

Peter Richards | Intuitive Actions, Common Attributes and Isolated Incidents

13 September - 1 November. Exhibition opens Friday 12 September, 7pm

A free bus will run between Belfast and Portadown on the evening of Friday 12 September. To book a space please contact geraldine@millenniumcourt.org

Bus | Pick up at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast: 6.45pm | Depart from Millennium Court Arts Centre: 8.45pm

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present Intuitive Actions, Common Attributes and Isolated Incidents, a solo exhibition by Belfast-based Welsh artist and curator Peter Richards. The exhibition is composed of 12 new and re-presented works, some of which will be assembled and only activated on the exhibition’s opening. 

Richards moves fluidly between disciplines using performance, pinhole and analogue photography, video, film, audio, text and mark making. In his practice he explores the durational aspect of early photographic techniques and the representation of performance, often working collaboratively in series and regularly making use of antiquated equipment - slide and film projectors, reel-to-reel, SVHS. For Intuitive Actions, Common Attributes and Isolated Incidents Richards continues to develop these ideas as he explores and plays on the literal, physical and metaphysical implications of time, circularity, process and duration, also referencing the work of Lucy Lippard, Herbert Marcuse, and Samuel Beckett's Endgame.

A publication will follow the exhibition.

For information about the artist click here: Peter Richards

Future Exhibition: Peter Finnemore | Nature Boy

4 July - 30 August 2014. Preview 3 July from 7pm

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present Nature Boy, an exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist Peter Finnemore. 

Nature Boy is the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Ireland. It brings together a large body of photographic and video work focussing on Finnemore’s continuing investigation of the private familial landscape of his garden in rural Wales, which he transforms “into poetic symbol as home, territory, burial ground, [and] paradise.”* His work has been described as dream-like, unsettling, clever and irreverent, and seriously funny. 

The garden in Nature Boy is a microcosm of the wider world; the work tackles themes, ranging from conflict to notions of national identity and the adoption of cultural camouflage. At other times it addresses nature itself with references to pagan folklore or by focussing on the intense colour of the garden in bloom as a vehicle of poetic realism. In his video work Finnemore develops themes and motifs which fragment, collide and echo with the photographic and physical, installed elements of the exhibition. He alludes to subjects as diverse as philosophy, Zen and Schrödinger's cat, the politics of dancing, landscape and art history, fire, the shed as fortress and dwelling, the militarization of consciousness, Westerns, Martial Arts Movies, Elvis, Nature and Culture, and Guerrilla Gardeners. 

*Cynthia Greig in Zen Gardener Catalogue, Oriel Mostyn Gallery, 2004 

About the Artist: Peter Finnemore is an artist working within photographic art, multi-media installation and video. He has exhibited widely in solo shows throughout Wales, Scotland, England and has been included in numerous group exhibitions in Britain,United States and Europe; he represented Wales at the 51st Venice Biennale of Art, 2005. He currently works as an artist and is Senior Lecturer of Art and Design at University of Wales Trinity St David. He is based in Llanelli, Wales.

Our Sponsors for Nature Boy: Riverside Garden Sheds, Lisburn & Smylie Sectional Builidings, Bangor

KELLY RICHARDSON: HAUNTED

CURATED BY GREGORY MCCARTNEY

EXHIBITION OPENING & LAUNCH OF 10TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE OF ABRIDGED - FRIDAY 11 APRIL FROM 7PM. 

FREE BUS Runs on evening of event from Golden Thread Gallery Belfast - Departs 7pm & returns from Portadown at 8.45pm. To book a space contact geraldine@millenniumcourt.org

Millennium Court Arts Centre (Portadown), VOID Gallery (Derry~Londonderry) and Abridged Magazine presents Haunted, a dual exhibition by Kelly Richardson, curated by Gregory McCartney. Part One launches in April at MCAC Portadown and Part Two will be forthcoming at VOID, Derry. The exhibition is accompanied by a special 10th anniversary edition of Abridged. 

Richardson’s work offers potential alternative futures in which the landscape becomes something alien and uncertain, beautiful but perhaps subtly vengeful. Referencing science fiction and the apocalyptic sublime she creates potentialities in which progress has perhaps failed, testified by the flickering holographic trees of The Erudition, or taken a completely new evolutionary path.

The works in MCAC could be considered as the end-game of humanity’s exploitation and exhaustion of the natural world or they could be the start of a new evolution, a new hybridisation of the scientific and natural; most likely the former has caused the latter. Science creates its own fictions and progress isn’t always benign; progression inherently carries within it obsolescence and atrophy. Ideas and ideals are thrown by the wayside.

Landscape is in the end a form of portraiture and we get the feeling that that the populous of The Erudition and Orion Tide are in trouble. They might be erudite but erudition doesn't necessarily equate with wisdom. These eco-systems are haunted; memory and precognition, remembrance and revelation frame everything. The artist combines technical virtuosity with an apocalyptic sensibility resulting in works subtle and at once vast in their scope. They exist not only in the tradition of artists’ film and video but also in that of landscape painting; in the same sphere as Turner and John Martin in their creation of abstract, epic landscapes full of storm and revelation but also delicate and beautiful. Richardson gives us a glimpse of a future here. It is up to us to decide what to do next.  

Abridged aims to commission and publish contemporary/experimental poetry and to initiate contemporary art exhibitions. We encourage poets/artists to investigate the articulation of ‘Abridged’ themes. These themes focus on contemporary concerns in a rapidly changing society. We are offering an alternative and complete integration of poetry, art and design. 0 – 10: Haunted includes artwork by Kelly Richardson and poetry from leading Irish and international poets.

Presently | An exhibition of Contemporary Artists from Northern Ireland

Gordon Ashbridge, Christopher James Burns, Stuart Calvin, Ian Cumberland, Craig Donald, Fiona Finnegan, Eimear Friers, Ben Groves, Angela Halliday, Dorothy Hunter, Aisling Kane, Miguel Martin, Tim Millen, Brian J. Morrison, Blaine O’Donnell, Eamon Quinn, Peter Spiers, Anne Marie Taggart
Curated by Feargal O’Malley

Exhibition 7 February - 29 March 2014

Opening Thursday 6 February, 7pm

Presently showcases new work from eighteen emerging contemporary artists, currently working in Northern Ireland. Exhibited work ranges from sculpture, painting, drawing, photography and film to installation and multidisciplinary work. Presently is accompanied by a new limited edition broadsheet style publication which includes an introductory essay by Ciara Hickey.

Download Presently Broadsheet

Working in partnership with MCAC, Visual Artist's Ireland will run a series of information sessions, curator and artist talks on Saturday 1 March at MCAC.

For more information about exhibiting artists follow the links to their individual websites:

Gordon Ashbridge, Christopher James Burns, Stuart Calvin, Ian Cumberland, Craig Donald, Fiona Finnegan, Eimear Friers, Ben Groves, Angela Halliday, Dorothy Hunter, Aisling Kane, Miguel Martin, Tim Millen, Brian J. Morrison, Blaine O’Donnell, Eamon Quinn, Peter Spiers, Anne Marie Taggart

Exhibition Launch 6 December, 7pm.  Runs 7 December – 25 January 2014. Artist's talk, Saturday 14 December at MCAC from 2pm - for more details contact geraldine@millenniumcourt.org
 

 “A psychologist at a girl’s college asked the members of his class to compliment any girl wearing red. Within a week the cafeteria was a blaze of red. None of the girls were aware of being influenced, although they did notice that the atmosphere was more friendly…” – W. Lambert Gardiner, Psychology: A Story of a Search

Emerging, Northern Irish artist Michael Hanna has been commissioned by Millennium Court Arts Centre and awarded ACES* funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to produce a new body of work and exhibition, Behaviour Setting. 

Behaviour Setting has developed from a year’s residency at MCAC. Using installation with film Hanna’s work ventures into the fields of manipulation, perception, space and patterns of behaviour; his research crossing disciplines, from environmental and behavioural psychology to planning discourse, in order to create a visual language of control. Hanna is interested in behaviour and its links to external environmental factors.

In his work the artist appropriates evocative materials like acoustic foam and perforated steel with tactile art materials; wet clay, rubber and plastics. These are integrated with video projection and animation. During his residency Hanna has conducted research, including a series of curated auditory and sensory events for the public in a number of private spaces throughout the large Millennium Court complex. Building on site-specific knowledge the artist has planned an intervention on the scale of the galleries and foyer to subtly transform the immediate environment of the Arts Centre itself.

Hanna’s work has been described as showing a healthy disregard for institutional boundaries between disciplines**. Emerging from a sculptural background at Edinburgh College of Art and MFA at University of Ulster his practice draws on diverse research from linguistics to psychology. Likewise Behaviour Setting is an installation to be experienced, where the bounds are ambiguous. This large scale solo exhibition represents a new stage in the career of this emerging artist who has previously exhibited solo at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast and will be presenting a new work as part of Derry-Londonderry City of Culture in December 2013.

A publication will accompany the exhibition with essay by Dr Declan Long.

* Artist Career Enhancement Scheme (ACES)
** Dazed and Confused, Converse Highlight of the Week, June 2013 

Michael Hanna (b.1979, Craigavon, Northern Ireland) completed his MFA at the University of Ulster, 2012 and recently undertook residencies at the Golden Thread Gallery (GTG) and Digital Art Studios (DAS) in Belfast. He graduated with BA (Hons) in Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art,2009. Hanna has been involved in exhibitions in the UK and internationally including Futures at Elephant Gallery, Los Angeles and Instances of Agreement at the Kao Yuan Arts Centre, Taiwan. He has exhibited in group shows including Oscillator, Science Gallery, Dublin, 2013 and as a solo artist, Calculated Error, GTG, Belfast 2012. www.michaelhanna.org

Hanna discussing his work at Science Gallery Dublin, 2013

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present an exhibition of large scale animation and film by German artist Brigitte Zieger.

Zieger employs a range of media from drawing and cut-out to video and sculpture. Though her work may initially appear ideal and harmonious this perception disintegrates upon closer examination – explosive charges lurk everywhere. In this exhibition of work entitled Wallpapered Zieger comments on the relationship between world events and the process of interpreting and conveying information via the Media. Collecting motifs and images online and also using press photographs from newspapers and television news she incorporates this source material into her diverse, exquisitely animated ‘wallpapers’ and ‘tapestries’.

The aesthetic for these works draws on Toile de Jouy. Original 18th century Toile wallpapers often comprised elaborate imagery expressing commentary on contemporary society and the political events of the day. These dioramas could include vast vistas depicting colonized countries, with intimations of conquest, the exotic and endemic violence – their form sometimes reading like a comic strip. Zieger’s animations extend and develop the form. In her wallpapers kitsch, bucolic scenes become dangerously populated by threatening objects or people who move in and out of the scenery. The animation, Bewildered, presents an infinite rolling panoramic view in the heart of an imaginary forest (such as those described in the 'colonial period' and often depicted in 18th century wallpapers) – a scene of nature reclaiming the political landscape.

The juxtaposition of familiar domestic décor and potentially violent action or destruction provides a perfect metaphor for the presence of news within the privacy of the home – a disturbing background to daily life. Zieger’s richly textured work presents many possibilities and seeks to question what exactly we put in our homes, on our walls and what realities these help to soften and mask.

http://www.brigittezieger.com/

About the Artist:

Brigitte Zieger is a Paris-based German artist whose work embraces a range of media. She has shown internationally in numerous exhibitions including Abracadabra, Tate Gallery London (1999), Prop Fiction, White Columns New York (1997), Bang ! Bang ! at CCA Kunsthalle Andratx Mallorca (2011), Fabulations et Vagabondages, Contemporary Art Center Villa du Parc in Annemasse (2005) and Tirs Reloaded/Pacific Standard Time, Here is Elsewhere Gallery Los Angeles (2012). Recent Solo Shows include Women are Different from Men, Odile Ouizeman Gallery in Paris (2011), Counter-Memories at Weigand Gallery in Berlin (2012) and with Kara Walker, Shadow's Dream the Man, l'Aître St.Maclou Rouen (2010).

Pat Connor, Michael Flynn, Christy Keeney, Lucy Meagher, Peter Meanley, Ann Marie Robinson and Alex Scott. Curated by Mike Robinson 

“The pot mantelpiece figure and the more pretentious porcelain figurine in its crinoline frock, that grandma kept locked in the corner cabinet, are familiar to all. Well, times have changed…they (figurative ceramics) are no longer mere twee sentimental decorations. They have also grown in stature and can be literally larger than life. They may attract, amuse and entertain, but they are just as willing and able to challenge, shock, even offend if that is what it takes to get the message across.”                             Mike Robinson, Curator

Figure brings together seven contemporary artists from Northern and Southern Ireland working in the field of figurative ceramic sculpture. This exhibition which is curated by Mike Robinson includes work by Pat Connor, Michael Flynn, Christy Keeney, Lucy Meagher, Peter Meanley, Ann Marie Robinson and Alex Scott. These artists and makers have been chosen not simply because they are all preeminent in their field, but also because they clearly demonstrate the importance of Ceramic in contemporary art.

Historically, the human figure has represented the most commonly addressed form in sculpture. From the 1950s forward, abstract and non-representational modes of thinking became critical to sculptors and representing the figure in more literal terms fell largely out of fashion. Recently, many artists have returned to the figure but in decidedly contemporary terms, embracing a range of aesthetics and themes.

Figure considers a wide variety of formal and conceptual approaches in Contemporary Ceramics, from more literal terms to those which are implied or symbolically stated. The exhibition opens with the “pot” figure as something familiar, something to warm to, even laugh at and moves through to the decorative. From there Figure ventures into what may be unfamiliar ceramic territory exploring self (anxiety, obsession, desire, dreams) and the expression of, through myth or abstraction, “beliefs and notions essential to us that may escape description let alone definition”.

Commissioned as part of August Craft Month 2013 and influenced by the strength and variety of the figurative tradition, this exhibition explores the contemporary figure from objects to installations, while surveying a broad spectrum of concepts, forms and materials.

A publication (in August) and four part lecture series by Mike Robinson (September) will accompany the exhibition. 

Citizen is a new exhibition and installation by artist Anthony Haughey. The exhibition is a cross-border collaboration with Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown and Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda.

The border in Ireland has been historically marked with signs of conflict and sectarian division (the subject of the artist’s earlier work, Disputed Territory (2006). It has been documented and defined culturally in literature, art and filmic representations. Yet it is easy to forget that the border is also an international boundary. There are no fences or passport control; a more subtle and pervasive form of surveillance is used instead. For migrants, the border is part of ‘Fortress Europe’ where they are subjected to the vagaries of European immigration policies.

Borders and transnational migration has been a major theme of Haughey’s art practice for more than twenty-years. Although his work has encompassed a wide range of subjects, he has continually returned to this on-going investigation of what Saskia Sassen describes as ‘informal citizenship’, where migrants contest the right to move freely across borders in search of a better life. The movement of people across continents, seas and oceans is no longer fixed to a specific sense of place; migrants exist in-between states, attempting to negotiate citizenship with reluctant hosts. Despite the current economic crisis, migration is a global phenomenon that is here to stay.

Haughey has worked collaboratively with individuals and groups who have left their countries of origin in the most urgent of times, many are living in temporary Reception Centre’s such as Mosney, near Drogheda for more than seven-years. Others are living on the periphery of European cities, near harbours in derelict buildings and squatter camps, and in forests behind six-metre high razor wire fences in North Africa waiting for an opportunity to enter ‘El Dorado’, the Spanish enclaves of Cueta and Melilla. Migrants are variously described by as refugees, asylum seekers, illegal aliens and sans papiers, stateless figures relegated to new spaces described by Giorgio Agamben as ‘camps’ or non-spaces located within state boundaries, and yet outside. The camp is a 'space of exception' within and without national space, where rights afforded to citizens of the state are suspended.

Through a series of long-term encounters, and in many cases close personal relationships Haughey and a growing collective of migrants from all over the world have collaborated to produce video installations, photographs, texts and performances. These transformative actions set out to dispel myths and reductive stereotyping surrounding transnational migration. Instead, migrants reclaim their agency and participate as active ‘informal citizens’.

Bio:  Anthony Haughey is an artist and a lecturer in the Dublin Institute of Technology, where he supervises doctoral practice-based projects. He was a Research Fellow (2005-8) at the Interface Centre for Research in Art, Technologies and Design at the University of Ulster Belfast, where he completed a PhD in 2009. His art practice works from the premise of a principal situatedness of art in place and community and its connectedness through dialogic exchange. His work has been widely exhibited internationally, most recently in Belfast Exposed, where he was nominated for the Deutsche Borse prize, Künstlerhaus S11, Solothurn, Switzerland, Helsinki Photography Biennial, the Copper House Gallery Dublin, New York Photography Festival and the Korea Foundation in Seoul. Monographs include The Edge of Europe (1996), Disputed Territory (2006) and an artist’s book, State (2011) with German artist Susanne Bosch. His work is represented in many international public and private art collections. He has published several chapter contributions including, (2010)Dislocations: Participatory Media with Refugees in Ireland and Malta, in Goodnow, K and Skartveit, H L. (eds) Changes in Museum Practice New Media and Refugees: Forms and Issues of Participation, Berghahn and (2007) Imaging the Unimaginable, in Grossman, A. and O’Brien, A. (eds) Projecting Migration, Transcultural Documentary Practice, London: Wallflower Press. Haughey is currently researching a project, for the centenary of the Dublin 1913 Lockout and editing a publication, Art, Media and Contested Space.

Exhibition Launch - Thursday 7 February from 7 pm

‘How can all the world’s glorious “technicolour phenomenology arise from soggy grey matter?”’ (Philosopher Colin McGinn quoted in catalogue essay*)

How do we occupy space? What do we mean by the body? What is it that makes us who we are and does it exist within, or without? In an exhibition of new work, Trouble = Progress at Millennium Court Arts Centre, artist and ACES (Arts Council of Northern Ireland and their Artists Career Enhancement Programme) recipient Emma Donaldson attempts to disentangle these metaphysical questions in sculpture, installation, video, writing and drawing. The forms created are both beautiful and enigmatic.

Donaldson’s work teases out the relationship between the physical body as a vessel and what she refers to as the “mental armatures” (formed by experience) that shape our perception of self; the enduring philosophical mind-body problem. Her work is about mapping the unchartered landscape of the psyche and mental processing; how we receive, transfer and lose information. Through a process of experimentation she creates new forms to articulate fleeting and ephemeral experiences, and to visualise processes of thought and memory. The work also situates itself in the real physical world, in architectural spaces, the street and the landscape outside the artist’s studio window.

LP1 V, 2012 a structure with flickering and sequenced flashing light bulbs, like synapses, seek to capture the essence and dynamics of thought. Similarly the 5 meter hanging piece, entitled Stacked may be seen as representing a train of thought or perhaps the layering up of experience. Other sculptures, with their softness and precarious balance on attenuated plinthes allude to anxiety or instability. The watercolour sketches meanwhile demonstrate development of ideas and themes within the work itself over a period of 12 months; recurring circular motifs that are later realised in three dimensions. And, through a written text piece and accompanying video work Donaldson takes the viewer on a sensory walk, through a home and into the outside world. She performs a topoanalysis of a familiar place to investigate how real physical space affects memory creating mental armatures that contribute to perception and behaviour. The trouble of the title alludes perhaps to the fact that any progress is hard won, non-linear and messy.

“Clean bricks are made of mud, we need them for our tower”. (Thomas Kinsella from Nightwalker, quoted in catalogue essay*)

-- A publication will accompany the exhibition, new essay by Gemma Tipton.

This exhibition has been made possible through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and their Artists Career Enhancement Programme (ACES).

Artist’s Bio: Studied painting at Wimbledon School of Art, Royal College of Art in London, University of Houston and Histories and Theories of Architecture at the AA, London. She has exhibited at both solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally: Queens Street Studios, 2010, Golden Thread Gallery, 2009, Context Gallery Derry, 2006 Central Space London, 2002, 49 Broadway Market, London, 2001, Veneer/Folheado, Galerie Ze de Bois, Lisbon, 2004, Musuem of Arab Contemporary Art, Sharjah, UAE, 2003

To coincide with the exploration of sub-glacial Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica this winter Millennium Court Arts Centre presents Crystalline, an exhibition of work by both internationally known artists and local practicing artists, graduates & postgraduates living or working throughout Northern Ireland. The exhibition incorporates pieces submitted through Open Submission and by invitation, and the work explores the twin themes of scientific endeavour and the landscape of Antarctica, the latter of which has proved unfalteringly seductive to artists. Working in various disciplines the artists represented in Crystalline cover many facets of Antarctic exploration, teasing out aspects of the barren terrain, seemingly devoid of colour, sound and life, and the inverted sub-glacial landscape below the surface.

The Frozen Laboratory: There is a powerful trope associated with Antarctica portraying it as blank, politically neutral, pristine territory. It is free from a history of warfare and turmoil. Its environment is uncompromisingly resistant to permanent human habitation and colonisation. In 1959 the Antarctic Treaty was signed making the entire continent a science reserve and ensuring that no one country could claim sovereignty.  Antarctica may therefore be viewed as the world’s largest living laboratory. Lake Ellsworth, which is the site for drilling by a British team this winter 2012, lies beneath the continental ice sheet in West Antarctica and it is hoped that the ancient water therein will reveal information about the earth, life and the environment.

Time in the Antarctic is generally comprehended in geological epochs rather than by human timescale. Roy and Kathryn Nelson examine this concept through materials and processes that demonstrate a physical accumulation of time. Belinda Loftus’s work references the extreme conditions for life in Antarctica while Joanne Proctor’s drawings obliquely point towards the origins of life and by extension the idea that exploration may yield new discovery. It is thought that conditions in Antarctica’s subglacial lakes may demonstrate how microbial life can exist in extreme conditions, similar to those on other planets and moons in the solar system. David Hamilton’s paintings seem to point both to the cosmos and the ice sheet.

As a counterpoint to the celebratory nature of scientific discovery Heather Fleming’s work looks at the mechanics and practicalities of endeavour in a harsh environment, the fleeting traces through snow and ice and the covert scramble for resources (in this case oil). This complicates the neutral laboratory by suggesting that scientific knowledge and technology may be appropriated for commercial gain.

Works by Dorothy Cross, Jana Winderen and Ruth le Gear represent art made on location in extreme conditions. Cross’s monochromatic film piece, rendered in negative, shows a group of deep sea divers in the icy, crystal waters of Antarctica. Her work also seems to reference the early history of human exploration in the Antarctic, motivated by commerce through hunting of seals and whales. This precipitated the later age of heroic exploration (1895-1917) in the continent, an idea explored in the paintings of Damien Flood. Before it was mapped and charted Antarctica was a place between fact and fiction (Terra Australis Incognita), speculated about since the second century but not seen until the nineteenth. Flood’s fantastical landscape paintings reveal his curiosity about these expeditions, and the struggles and hardships that accompany voyages in search of undiscovered, foreign or otherworldly landscapes.

Through sculptural assemblage Shelby Woods reflects on the inhospitable landscape as the ideal location to gain objectivity on the human condition, on loneliness and mortality. Similarly through painting Anna Marie Savage probes the state of solitude. Antarctica, perhaps due to its ‘blankness’ and sublime landscape is also a tabula rasa on to which imagination is projected. Claire Muckian’s micro-scale sculptural work is derived from satellite imagery of subglacial lakes and posits the lake as a metaphor for creativity – hidden pockets of imagination in everyday contexts. Mark Joyce’s paintings meanwhile revel in the crystalline sharpness of light in a cold climate, inspired by time spent in Iceland.

Jana Winderen’s work merges with scientific research – using advanced sound recording technology Winderen records in crevasses of glaciers, in fjords and in the open ocean of the frozen north. Weaving together these hidden sounds into complex soundscapes she reveals the rich complexities and strangeness of the world beneath. Ruth le Gear, who recently completed a residency in the Arctic Circle (another extreme environment), is strongly attracted by the scientific method behind investigation of non-physical phenomena and conversely the requirement of investigating fictional scenarios to understand more about the self – ideas she explores in these two exhibited films.

Dorothy Cross, Antarctica shown by kind permission of the artist and the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. Mark Joyce and Damien Flood shown by kind permission of the artists and Green on Red Gallery, Dublin. Jana Winderen, work used with kind permission of the artist and publisher Touch Music.

Irish Times Review (4 Jan 2013): Exploring Sublimely Ridiculous Antarctica by Aidan Dunne

For this new body of work Victoria J. Dean focuses on the built environment of the coastline. Two years in the making, Dean circumnavigated and documented the entire coastline of the island of Ireland to further investigate the theme of our human compulsion to rationalise space.

Dean’s work highlights the many overlooked, often absurd or jarring aspects of the contemporary coastal environment. She records the different eras of seaside architecture in their various states of regeneration and disrepair: from the brutal whimsy of public lavatories, totalitarian bus shelters and architectural flourishes in concrete to ‘temporary’ containers, pared back promenades resembling prison perimeters and modern, functional leisure areas. With a sometimes bemused eye she also records the plethora of regulations and health and safety warnings that line areas along the coast. According to Dean, “the various fortifications including urban furniture, encourage us to survey the natural environment from the safety of the man-made, be it from behind a wall, or from a bench”. While many fortifications and signs do have sound environmental and safety purposes the sheer abundance and caution (in safeguarding) may appear as nothing more than the crooked index finger of a nanny state.

Fortified Coastline asks the viewer to reconsider these familiar landscapes of leisure. It highlights a tension between nature and the encroachment of human development on the landscape but even further it emphasises the attempt to control human behaviour in these spaces. Through meticulous documentation Dean’s work attempts to create a new iconography of coastal spaces.

This exhibition has been made possible through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and their Artists Career Enhancement Programme (ACES).

About the Artist: Dean graduated in 2003 with BA (Hons) Photography from Blackpool and the Fylde College. She is a member of Young Photographers United and was selected in 2007 for PDN's 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch. Dean has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the UK and Ireland and has appeared in publications including Magenta Foundation and the British Journal of Photography. She has won awards from ACNI, Magenta Foundation and NIVAF.

Look At Me Now And Here I Am is a body of new photographic and video work by Northern Irish artist Tim Doak. Delving into the world of human trafficking Doak presents fragmentary portraits of six young Cambodian women/girls. These women were trafficked into the sex trade in Cambodia as children and are now living under the care of Ratanak International (Aid Organisation).

Doak cites the formation of relationships with his subjects as foremost in his methodology; allowing stories to emerge naturally. In this work the sensitivities, language and working time constraints encouraged close collaboration (photographic workshops and interviews) and significant input from the young women in the making of representative portraits. Included are twelve images produced by them during photography workshops in April-May 2012. The women are anonymous for various reasons though they have chosen the names Esther, Amuy, Miya, Kan Nga, Soriya and Srey Pouv. Their faces are obscured or their bodies turned completely but their surroundings, voices, gestures and physicality create a narrative of their current situations in view of their pasts.

The work at once touches on a widespread problem in contemporary Cambodia (as well as the worldwide crisis in human trafficking), and one that is exacerbated partly by corruption, wealth disparity and by economic dependency produced by ‘sex tourism’. Although these problems are systematic Doak aims to tell personal stories at an indivisible human level. This exhibition is the first instalment of what Doak intends to be an ongoing project in Cambodia.

Tim Doak graduated with a Masters Degree in Photography from the University of Ulster, Belfast, in 2011, and has himself worked as a part time lecturer in photography at Southern Regional College (Down, Armagh). Doak has been represented in a number of exhibitions throughout the UK and Ireland and has contributed to a variety of publications including Beautiful Dawn, Belfast, 2011. (See attached CV). He was awarded SIAP funding from ACNI in 2012.

This exhibition has been made possible through Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Craigavon Borough Council, Portadown 2000 and Ratanak International.Printing by Fire, Dublin

Between Art And Industry is a new exhibition of work commissioned in partnership with the National Craft Gallery, Kilkenny and curated by Ann Mulrooney. The exhibition offers an opportunity to explore the shifting relationships between craft and industry through the use of evocative imagery utilising text, film and sound. 

With the advent of globalisation, methods of manufacturing have shifted dramatically. Outsourcing of labour to other countries has resulted in decline of industrial manufacturing in Ireland and the UK. This exhibition reflects on those trends, on their consequences and costs, and on the potential for sustainable, highly skilled small-scale production to offer a new model.

Between Art and Industry features work by UK maker Neil Brownsword, whose work focuses on the decline of the potteries of Stoke-on-Trent while Irish glass artist Roisin de Buitlear's work will be considering Waterford Glass. Donegal based weavers Molloy and Sons provide a counterpoint with an insight into successful, contemporary, commercial craft making.

Ann Mulrooney of the National Craft Gallery, says of the exhibition (quoted in National Craft Gallery website): 
 “The title of this exhibition expresses the relationship of craft to industry. Craft is an intelligence of the hand that creates the bridge between initial inspiration and finished product. It is a specific, skillful, engaged and physical understanding of materials and process, problem-solving by its nature. Shifting values suggest that the evolution of manufacturing now is towards a closer relationship with craft and the handmade. In that sense, this exhibition could be seen as an arc, responding to the legacies of history but also describing a present in which new manifestations of small-scale production can be seen to emerge and survive”

An exhibition catalogue accompanies the work. Between Art And Industry is a 30 page, full colour, softback catalogue, published 2012 with introduction by Jackie Barker, curator's essay, 'Between Arts And Industry' by Ann Mulrooney and essay, 'Future Needs The Past' by Finbarr Bradley (UCD).

Gallery 1

This body of work explores the subtle relationships of spaces, intersections, fissures and lacunas between forms and objects. Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh communicates the process of constructing an image with punctuated colour and geometry of reserved canvasses. While elements of Ní Mhaonaigh’s previous investigations in painting are recalled in this work, this untitled series also represents a development in the artist’s approach to the canvas. Dramatic use of colour contrasts against varying degrees of density within the new works, which explore the complexities of looking and examine the differences between how an image is made and what the image is. 

Millennium Court Arts Centre thanks Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda for their kind assistance in bringing this exhibition together.

About: Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh (born 1977) was shortlisted for the AIB Prize in 2009 and was selected for Futures at the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, 2009. In 2010 she won the Hennessy Craig Scholarship at the RHA. Recent shows include, Paintings(Solo), West Cork Arts Centre, 2010, Paintings(Solo), Galway Arts Centre, 2009 , UNBUILDING with Bea McMahon, Mermaid Arts Centre, 2010, curated by Cliodhna Shaffrey, Eilis Lavelle and Rosie lynch. Her work is represented in many collections, both private and public in Ireland such as the collections of Contemporary Irish Arts Society, Arts Council of Ireland, DIT, Boyle Civic Collection and Aspen Insurance. 

Transposer: to alter the positions of; interchange, as words in a sentence; put into a different order.

Spoons have been a recurring image within Yendell’s work, their association with food, comfort, sustenance, nurture, love and as an instrument of measure have given them multifaceted meanings. As a choice of subject matter they reflect an awareness of the intrinsically human-scaled design of the objects with which we surround ourselves.

This exhibition focuses on the large scale reproduction of teaspoons, treated in a variety of ways, receiving projections, some cradling inside others and interacting with the gallery space. The artist converts this everyday object into an artefact to be considered anew through a transformation in scale, use of ‘natural’ materials and removal of the object’s function. The object distanced from reality, introduces itself into a poetic universe of its own. Drawing also plays an important part in the development of Yendell’s work and her large sculptural pieces are accompanied by intricate project drawings realized in Chinese ink with elements of collage.

“I hope in the end that my work offers a discourse where humour and tenderness does not impede its effectiveness” – Lesley Yendell

About: Lesley Yendell is an English sculptor, originally from Leeds, and now based in Barcelona. She has completed residencies in Spain, France, and Northern Ireland, and has been awarded ‘ART FAD silver prize’ and ‘Visual Arts Fellow’ in the UK, as well as a scholarship from the University of Barcelona. Her work is represented in various public and private collections including Craigavon Borough Council.

 Creative Craigavon Video with Yendell Installation

There is a calmness and informality in Bowler’s portraits of these spaces. They reveal, perhaps, a central quality of Islamic faith – that during sallah (prayer) there is nothing between one’s self and the divine. Without formal structures or divisions, these spaces are evidence of an earnest faith that transcends the separations and barriers established in secular life. They testify to the simple ways in which spiritual experience can co-exist within everyday vernacular conditions.

Devoid of any distinction or ornamentation apart from the ubiquitous prayer rugs (or sajjada), Bowler’s documentation of these everyday and generic spaces offers considered insights into the adaptability of modern Islamic communities and the ease with which mundane spaces are occupied, complemented and transformed. 

Making Space is a touring exhibition organised by Gallery of Photography Ireland in partnership with Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown.

A publication featuring a text by Colin Graham accompanies the exhibition. 

An exhibition catalogue accompanies the work. Making Space is a 64 page, full colour, hardback catalogue, published 2011 (edition of 500) with essay 'Description as Revelation' by Colin Graham. It is available to buy from Gallery of Photography, Dublin and at Millennium Court Arts Centre @ £17.
​

Walk the Line is about the transforming mystery of good drawing – its ability to freeze and flow like water. This dynamic exhibition aims to investigate the relationship and connections between two “shapeshifters”; drawing and poetry, between the sequential evocations of writing and the continuous, immediately present drawn image. Artists Hooghiemstra and Kramer often incorporate text into their work whether through title and accompanying poetry, by creating neologisms or in palimpsest, on the very paper supporting the image – Walk the Line is partly a development of this work. In Brown’s view there are less “cover-ups” in drawing than writing or talk. Instead good drawing exceeds and confuses truth by mixing up the real and imagined, or walking the line between. The title references both Johnny Cash and Paul Klee’s idea of imaginatively “taking a line for a walk”.

This exhibition also responds to the continuing enthusiasm for drawing, popular with the public for its directness and immediacy. It aims to develop this further through the methods in which the works are presented, having been drawn and scribed straight onto the walls. This visceral process creates an experience for the viewer, bringing them directly into what is usually a private activity, which can very often betray a conscious or subconscious thought process.

The viewer is invited to participate directly in the development of the exhibition by taking the line for a walk over the walls of Gallery 2.

This exhibition toured to Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre, Limavady and Ormston House, Limerick in 2012.

An exhibition catalogue accompanies the work. Walk The Line is a 40 page, full colour, soft back catalogue, published 2011 with introduction, by Jackie Barker, an essay 'Walk The Line' by John Brown and joint statement by the three artists.

ISBN 978-0-9558649-7-1

On Tenterhooks is an exhibition of a new body of work that was created in response to a discussion with Millennium Court Arts Centre about the Craigavon area by Aideen Barry, a practicing visual artist based in the West of Ireland. Nominated by Millennium Court Arts Centre, the proposal for this exhibition was shortlisted for the prestigious AIB prize 2010.

The word On tenterhooks refers to being in a state of uneasiness, anxiety, or suspense, stretched like the cloth on the tenter. In this show Visual Artist Aideen Barry explores the idea through performative videos, animations, drawings, photography and sculpture. These manifestations of what the artist calls "Visual Fictions" play on what we perceive to be real, the humdrum banal domesticity, with the unreal. Her protagonist behaves in an odd uneasy way, manifesting slapstick behaviour in an effort to deal with the ordinary of the everyday, while some of the drawing and sculptural objects play on architectural folly, something that becomes a recurring theme in Barry's recent work. Shooting film and performances in abandoned contemporary housing estates both North and South of the border, the artist plays with the notion of the contemporary "Houses of Usher", the most haunted of houses, of landscapes and of space of the "in-between".

This exhibition is based on the notion of a landscape created by man-made forces but possessed by grief, loss and failing. The haunted landscapes in our contemporary environment are the unfinished and repossessed housing estates, the redundant shopping centres and the desolate, unused car parks. Since the bursting of the years long property bubble haunted houses are often perceived as being inhabited by disembodied spirits of the deceased who may have been former residents or were familiar with the property.

MCAC looks forward to this exciting, new work by Aideen Barry in her show On Tenterhooks. In the videos her protagonist behaves in an odd uneasy way in these surroundings, manifesting slapstick behaviour in an effort to deal with the ordinary of the everyday, while some of the drawing and sculptural objects play on architectural folly. Uninhabited housing estates that are scattered all over Ireland spoiling towns and countrysides and the nervousness in a homely setting that sneaks up on people is the centre of investigation for Aideen Barry. Her use of new technologies, like different video works and sculptures visualises the different dimensions of these abandoned lonely buildings and the confused irritated people living in them.

About The Artist:

Aideen Barry is a Visual Artist, working in the mediums of performance, film, musical composition, drawings and animation. She is a recipient of the 2010 Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Awards, and is currently working on a project funded by the 2010-2011 New Works Award from the Arts Council of Ireland.

She was recently awarded funding from the Arts Council of Ireland’s Projects: New Work Award towards the creation of a new work filmed in Zero Gravity whilst on a residency at Kennedy Space Centre, NASA. She has worked on projects that have been exhibited in the Moderna Museet, Sweden and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio.

Barry teaches part-time in Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, The Galway Film Centre and also has lectured in several art institutions in the west. (please see CV for further detail)

transFORM
An exhibition of contemporary Irish Ceramics
Exhibition Runs:  12 August – 25 September 2011

with work by Adriana Ionascu, Alex Scott, Alison Kay, Andrew Ludick,
Christy Keeney, Deirdre Hawthorne, Deirdre Mc Loughlin, Derek Wilson, Elaine Riordan, Eleanor Swan, Frances Lambe, Grainne Watts, Gus Mableson, Helen Doherty, Henry Pim, Ingrid Murphy, Jack Doherty, Jane Jermyn, Jennifer Hickey, Karen Morgan, Kathleen Standen, Laura McNamara, Laura O'Hagan, Mandy Parslow, Marinna Klopp, Michael Flynn, Michael Moore, Neil Read, Nuala Creed, Nuala O'Donovan, Peter Fulop, Sara Flynn, Tina Byrne

To celebrate 2011 as the Year of Craft, and to coincide with August Craft Month, MCAC with Tina Byrne and Elaine Riordan of Ceramics Ireland curate an exhibition, which aims to represent the best of craft from both the North and South of Ireland.

There can be few exhibitions that have been given a more appropriate title than transFORM. Not only does it suggest the almost alchemical process that intense heat imposes on clay and minerals in the making of ceramics but it also captures the powerful role this exhibition will play in changing the current perception of Irish ceramics.

A panel of three independent jurors - two national and one international selected the show from an open application. The exhibition will provide an opportunity to see a comprehensive representation of contemporary Northern Irish and Irish ceramic practice produced by emerging as well as established makers.
MCAC and Ceramics Ireland want to present and celebrate the breadth of talent that exists in this exhibition and the Year of Craft is an ideal opportunity to represent the best of Northern Irish and Irish ceramics within this high caliber exhibition. 

The exhibition opened in Farmleigh Gallery from May to July 2011 in time for the World Crafts Council’s AGM, following its run at Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown it will travel to Limerick in October.

Sean Cotter: Memorate
Exhibition Runs:  1 July – 6 August 2011

Memorate, Latin memoratus, past participle of memorare (to bring 
to remembrance, mention, recount) to commemorate

Sean Cotter is at foremost an exciting painter. His paintings are partly imagined, observed and felt. There are strong reflections of mood, of an inner turmoil or tranquility.  There is an intense energy visible in the dense pattern of birds in flight in his compressed charcoal drawings. The paintings acknowledge the energy of nature and an exploration of planes of colour and media, sometimes pushing back and obscuring, and sometimes revealing potential images and associations as they arise, fabricating a special space which belongs to painting. 

“His approach to his work is both intuitive and expressionist. Whether his medium is a combination of charcoal and inks or oil on canvas he drips, pours, and splatters marks on to his paper and canvas grounds but always retaining a figurative dimension. Whether the black forms that swarm around the edges of such works as Sky Writings are birds or clods of earth thrown up by some apocalyptic event is not important. What is important is that they represent a  vortex of movement in the landscape...that is packed with an emotional charge, causing us to think more profoundly about the future of our planet and our place within it.”

Catherine Marshall, 2008

Sean Cotter was born in Monasterevin, County Kildare. He studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, graduating in 1991 with an honours degree in Fine Art Painting. Involved in over 32 group exhibitions throughout Europe since 1991, his work can be found in international and Irish public collections; Lapua Arts and Science Foundation, Finland, Lapua Taidemuseo, Finland, Anglo Irish Bank, London, Aviva Investors, London, OPW Collections and Kildare, Louth and Wicklow County Councils among others. 

The Past Is Another Country continues Nickerson’s investigation into the nature of identity and this series explores how global homogenisation has affected indigenous and local culture. Her work is driven by a passionate interest in people and their environments. She has spent the last ten years traveling all over the globe and the photographs from this exceptional series were made in Oman, Qatar, South Africa, Kenya, Japan, Ireland, France, China and the USA.

The works in the exhibition - showing everyday objects and situations that we might see on a daily basis - examine a dilemma of our modern world, where we are caught in a space between tradition and modernity, the local and the global. The objects and environments depicted in the works prompt the viewer to reflect on the nature of this dilemma and invite consideration of our own society and our own environment, raising questions of sustainability and lifestyle choices. They bring us face to face with questions of what culture means to us, and both how we are developing and how we would like to develop our own culture. There is a depth of feeling underpinning Nickerson’s practice and a truth underlies every one of these unforgettable photographs.

Ornate water towers to Bedouin encampments placed beside palatial desert homes; a troupe of Chinese opera singers preparing for a performance wearing western t-shirts; a young bride, whose hands are traditionally decorated in hennaed designs holds imported lilies; a plastic bamboo tree in a traditional geisha house; a story is told, a portrait of a place is revealed, subtly illustrating the appropriation of values from other parts of the world.

The exhibition has been made possible through kind support from Craigavon Borough Council and The Arts Council of Northern Ireland.  

About: Jackie Nickerson is an award-winning photographer with an international reputation. She is fascinated with all aspects of humanity and particularly in the differences and similarities of people across the globe, her work focuses on who we are and how we live.

Through her intuitive use of the camera, she examines situations of identity and culture, focusing on real and ordinary people and situations with simplicity and a strong sense of aesthetic and detail, her work presents her subjects with dignity and beauty. She has the ability to engage with those on the other side of the lens and it is this that has given her access to a diverse range of communities, enabling viewers to get an unobtrusive glimpse of people living in their own environment.

In her own words, she says that her aim as an artist is “always to see what’s really there.”

The exhibition has been created with kind support from Craigavon Borough Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Tickled Milk: An exhibition of work by service users of St Luke’s Hospital, Armagh and Sterkfontein Hospital, Johannesburg, South Africa
8 April – 21 April 2011

Artists Puleng Lesala and Eddie Rafferty collaborated to produce this series of artworks, contrasting the different lives and cultures of clients from the two hospitals in Northern Ireland and South Africa. They worked together in South Africa in 2006 on the first part and the final stage was completed by Eddie in Armagh in 2007.

The stories you can experience in the art works tell about experiences, journeys, tragedies, dreams, wisdom – life in general with all its ups and downs. Although the clients in Northern Ireland and South Africa have different backgrounds and personalities, they all come back to similar subjects: superstitions, their land and the importance of home.

From the artistic point of view these works are striking because of their simplicity and forthrightness. With simple techniques and without the background of art school knowledge of composition etc. strong and touching works have been created. New approaches of drawing give them additional fascination. The connection with the Art Brut by Jean Dubuffet and the art of Adolf Woelfi is visible.

Eddie Rafferty describes his experience:
“When a person creates something there is a moment, a second, even less than a second, when they ask themselves what, who, why am I going to make this mark, what am I going to tell or let the world know about me on this piece of paper. From the outset of this project I made it clear to everyone involved that this was not to be a medical file. During the time spent on these collaborations I was witnessing something very special and real. These drawings and paintings do not need to be analyzed or to be explained or to be classified as some sort of therapy. You don’t need a map or a navigational system to find a way to explain these life experiences, they are in front of us everyday at work, at home, on the TV or through our front windows. Stories we hold and carry along with us never to be told, which sometimes can be profound, sad, confused and beautiful. I am a very lucky man to have met such wonderful people and witnessed such fantastic artworks.”

This project was supported by the Southern Health & Social Care Trust and Arts Care.

Watershed: An exhibition of work by Chinese and Northern Irish Artists

Bill Penney, Yung Sau-Mui, Raymond Henshaw, Fung Ho-Yin, Fiona Joyce, Cheung Chung-Chu, Grace McMurray, Pauline Chan So-Yee, Janine Davidson, Liz Lau Win-Wa

Watershed: A critical point that marks a division or a change of course; a turning point: “a watershed in modern.. history, a time that… forever changed ..social attitudes” (Robert Reinhold).

Watershed is an exhibition of new work by both Chinese and Northern Irish artists and is a project in MCAC’s ‘Other Perspectives’ initiative. The exhibition features new work made in response to the theme of the title. 
The collaboration has been derived from the shared geographical, political and historical positions that exist between both Northern Ireland and Hong Kong. The importance of ports, ships and water the post-industrial environment and the shared political history between the two places raise interesting similarities and points for discussion. The exhibition provides the opportunity for artists taking part to create work for an international audience and further develop their practice, while developing international links and exposure for their work. 

The theme ‘Watershed’ has significance in this context, the word implies several meanings pertaining to physical geography as well as metaphorical associations with consciousness, tensions, splits and separations. In the context of the exhibition, the word has been defined in both its physical sense as the division between westward – flowing and eastward – flowing streams, and in its metaphorical sense as: A moment or event separating two distinct periods of time, a momentous event that alters the course of time.  

Curated by artist Raymond Henshaw, Ho Yin Fung, assistant professor HKPU School of Design and Jackie Barker, Director MCAC the exhibition is a collaboration between artists working in both Hong Kong and Northern Ireland. The exhibition will open at the Hong Kong Graphic Fiesta and move to the City Hall in Hong Kong on the 21st December, 2010, the exhibition will then tour to Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown and return to the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, Hong Kong. 

Millennium Court Arts Centre is pleased to present artists from the South Ulster area in our ‘Other Perspectives’ Group Exhibition, 14 January – 26 March 2011. 

Exhibiting artists include Damian Magee, Jan McNeill, Timothy Alexander Doak, David Hamilton, Eddie Rafferty, Jan Powell,Tatjana Vasic, Steve Lally, Michael Hanna, Anna-Marie Savage, Orlaith Cullinane, Sarah Rachel McBride, Conor Flanagan, Joanne Proctor, Peter Surginor, Dwyer McKerr, David Farquhar and Fionnuala Doran.

Selected by a prestigious panel of artists and curators, the submission process was open to practicing artists, students, recent graduates, and artists new to the art world looking for gallery exposure, who are based, living or working throughout the South Ulster area, incorporating Craigavon, Armagh, Banbridge, Newry, Dungannon and throughout the SELB area. 

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present a diverse selection of oil and watercolours drawn from The Niland Collection, Sligo, by one of the most important figures in the visual art of Ireland during the 20th century.

Jack B. Yeats’ artistic output reveals a fascination with characters that lived on the margins of society – those who in his own words had “something of the living ginger of life in them.” Over a career spanning seven decades, Yeats repeatedly drew and painted the tramps, travellers, circus performers, drunks, sailors and gypsies that populated his youth in Sligo. These characters are often represented as lone figures in scenes that set them apart from the rest of society.

This exciting exhibition examines Yeats’ themes and techniques that he developed throughout his career. Yeats had a particular interest in the people and rituals of everyday life, painting street sellers, sailors, funerals, travelling fairs, circuses and the races.

We can see this interest emerging in his early watercolours and develop in his late period works in oil for which he is most celebrated. As Hilary Pyle has pointed out “Yeats continued to look back to the themes of his watercolours when painting his late oils, where memory played a major part in his conceptions. Simple images are repeated after an interval of forty years…tinkers, tramps and pirates…people Yeats’ canvases of the forties, their energy and colour contributing to the colour and fire of the late oils, their more vulnerable aspect being explored as they are revealed on occasion as ‘everyman.’”

Gary Breeze - Lettering sculptor, Neil Brownsword – Ceramics artist, Sonya Clark - Textile artist, Rebecca Earley – Textile designer and expert in environmental textiles, David Gates – Furniture designer, Matthew Harris - Textile artist, Amy Houghton - Animation artist, Sue Lawty – Textile artist, Elizabeth Turrell - Enamel artist, Judith van den Boom & Gunter Wehmeyer - Slow designers, Heidrun Schimmel -Textile artist, Paul Scott & Ann Linnemann – Ceramics artists, Shane Waltener & Cheryl McChesney Jones – Artist and Choreographer, Esther Knobel – Jeweller, Ken Eastman & Dawn Youll  Ceramics artists

Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution is a touring exhibition from Craftspace curated with Helen Carnac. It features the work of nineteen international makers and artists reflecting on the “Slow Revolution”. The exhibition features textiles, jewellery, upcycling fashion, enamelling, furniture and ceramics.

Textile designer Rebecca Earley gave up a successful career in the fashion industry to work on her upcycling project. Mindful of the impact clothing and textile production has on the environment she turned to “upcycling” – increasing value by reuse. In her “Top 100” collection she takes discarded shirts from charity shops and through over-printing, re-cutting and re-styling she transforms unwanted items into one-off designer pieces. A second life is thus given to a polyester shirt that would otherwise take more than 200 years to decompose in landfill.

Shane Waltener is an artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. Crossing boundaries between fashion, craft, sculpture and fine art, his work has ranged from graffiti in icing sugar to knitted sculptures. For Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution he has created a ‘Garland’ installation. Made from colourful yarn, string and paper Waltener has used needlecraft and knotting techniques to make a vast woven installation which visitors are invited to add to with their crochet or knitting.

The slowness of the process of making and ideas of time are emphasised in the work of Sue Lawty (artist in residence at the V&A) who creates vast abstract drawings composed from thousands of small stones. Her measured intricate stone drawings suggest the vast geological time that transforms a rock into a minute sliver.

For this exhibition ceramic artist Paul Scott has worked in collaboration with Danish ceramicist Ann Linnemann. Ann has hand thrown a series of delicate porcelain cups and trays which Paul has printed with summer and winter trees, garden paths, borders, flower and vegetable beds, inspired by maps from the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery collection.

The importance of community and collaboration as an alternative to the fast-paced individualistic culture of today is also stressed within the Slow Movement, but this does not necessarily mean a rejection of technology. Amy Houghton will initiate a “Tweave” throughout the exhibition tour - an evolving woven digital artwork using social networking site Twitter.

Joseph M. happens to find himself falling - from the top of the tallest building in Lower Saxony. As he falls, he recounts memories from his years of travelling both for business and pleasure. Employing drawing, painting, collage and other forms of visual representation Brandes presents a surreal and often darkly humorous anti-narrative portrait (or ‘exploded fiction’) of Europe as described through his fictional protagonist, Joseph M.

Brande’s initial body of work grew from a visual diary (made in 1999) of his grandmother’s flight through Europe, to escape from the pogroms in Romania in 1913. Since making this diary and the accompanying trip across Europe in 1999 he has also taken inspiration, for his new work, from a variety of sources ranging from absurdist literature, comedy, design, old European travel guides and found photographs (which are used in collage throughout his work). Encompassing a lexicon of styles and materials from small paintings and collages, to vast highly detailed drawings on unconventional surfaces such as used floor vinyl, history is interwoven with his own experience and invention - as if told by a bewildered traveller whom we suspect has only left his armchair to put on the kettle. Throughout his work, Brandes misquotes both the familiar and exotic to absurd effect, whilst injecting the fantastical with deadpan humour and dry social observation.

Born in Wolverhampton, UK Stephen Brandes has lived and worked in Cork since 1993. He represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2005 as part of ‘Ireland at Venice’, and has shown in numerous exhibitions both in Ireland and internationally.
Solo projects include: A Grand Tour of the Invisible North, Galerie Robert Drees, Hannover, Germany, 2009; Walpurgisnacht, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, 2008; Why Travel? Right Here is Fantastic!, Ardbia Gallery, Galway, 2007; Chutzparadiso, West Cork Arts Centre, 2006; Klutz Paradiso, RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, 2006; Ways of Escape, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, 2004. Public collections include the Irish Museum of Modern Art, An Chomhairle Ealaíon /The Arts Council, AIB Bank and Crawford Gallery, Cork. Brandes has also worked on several curatorial projects, most notably Superbia, commissioned by Breaking Ground in Ballymun, Dublin, 2003 and with artists Mick O’Shea and Irene Murphy formed the absurdist culinary performance group, The Domestic Godless.

He is represented by Rubicon Gallery, Dublin

Archiving Place and Time examines the engagement of visual culture and art practice in Northern Ireland, investigating the socio-political and economic development of a post-conflict society. The exhibition engages with history, memory and archival material, in addition to current issues around urban regeneration in a post-industrial city and the reconstruction of post-conflict identity. It aims to imply a response to the changing definitions of space and questions of the inevitability of history raised by the Belfast Agreement / Good Friday Agreement. Over ten years on, there is a need to register, to record the investigations that are impelling artists working in this changed situation.

The work of artists and photographers from Northern Ireland registers these shifts and in a mediated way, present them back to the culture that is their source. The work for this exhibition has been selected from some of Northern Ireland’s most well-known, contemporary artists who are from, live or work in Northern Ireland. The work has been made in the last few years, embodying a more subtle and nuanced response to the huge changes signified by the Agreement.

Artist’s represented in the exhibition include Willie Doherty, Paul Seawright, John Duncan, Rita Duffy, Sandra Johnston, Conor McGrady, Mary McIntyre, Aisling O’Beirn, Philip Napier, Mike Hogg & Conor McFeely.

The initial showing of the exhibition at Manchester Metropolitan University in November 2009 was accompanied by a major conference: Irishness, Memory and Visuality, in conjunction with the British Association of Irish Studies. The exhibition will then tour to Wolverhampton Art Gallery from June to December 2010.

The exhibition was curated by MCAC Director Megan Johnston and Fionna Barber from Manchester Metropolitan Museum.

Stephen Brandes . Claire Carpenter . Gary Coyle . Brian Fay . Mark Francis . David Godbold . Anita Groener . Katie Holten . Timothy Emlyn Jones . Alice Maher . Niamh McCann . Eoin McHugh . Bea McMahon . Nick Miller . Tom Molloy . Isabel Nolan . Eoman O'Kane . Niamh O'Malley . Kathy Prendergast . Jim Savage . Gerda Teljeur . Martin Wedge

The Millennium Court Arts Centre presents a body of stunning new drawings by selected Irish artists. Curated by visual artist, teacher, and writer Arno Kramer, The exhibition is described as an ‘adventure.. based on visual quality’. Co-commissioned by Millennium Court Art Centre, Limerick City Gallery of Art, aKKuH in the Netherlands, the Centre Culturel Irlandais, the opening of ‘Into Irish Drawing’ at MCAC will provide the viewer with the final chance to see the exhibition.

This co commissioning partnership represents MCAC’s strong interest in and commitment to working with international partners and our ongoing support in the creation and promotion of new work by Irish artists.

This beautiful exhibition does not provide an objective summary of present day Irish drawing, it is instead a selection of work that was chosen for its visual quality. The exhibition is made up of a personal selection of work by the curator, chosen on the basis of its originality, authenticity and the fact that the pieces reflect the artist’s recognizable,signature style. In a broader perspective, the work was chosen for its identity, originality, content and the personal way in which it was created.  The selection of artists encompasses the most respected and established artists working in Ireland along with exciting, emerging artists including  Alice Maher, Stephen Brandes, David Godbold, Bea McMahon and Martin Wedge.

The exhibition responds to the continuing enthusiasm for drawing, popular with the public for its directness no other medium is better able to express the creation of art as directly as drawing. Drawing can be a private activity, which can very often betray conscious or subconscious thought process. The work within the exhibition possess a resonance with the viewer as it is possible for them to see and in many ways experience how a work has been created.

The use of drawing is the only common factor that unites the work in the exhibition. Wild, violent marks and scratches, thin spidery lines, brightly coloured cartoon characters, religious icons drawn in pen and ink and simple pencil drawings bearing the lightest touch make up the work and betray just some of the styles and materials used within this fascinating and beautiful exhibition. 

Arno Kramer works as a visual artist in the Netherlands and in Ireland. He has compiled various exhibitions, particularly exhibitions of drawings. In 2005 he curated Into Drawing, contemporary Dutch drawing. This show travelled to 5 European countries. He was a teacher for 20 years a teacher at the AKI Akademie voor Beeldende Kunst en Vormgeving (Academy of the Visual Arts and Design) in Enschede, the Netherlands and has been a guest teacher at art colleges in Ireland, England, Scotland and the USA. He publishes on the visual arts and also writes poetry.  

His own work has been displayed in the Netherlands, Ireland, England the USA, Sweden and Germany and is in private and public collections in these countries. As of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Twenthe Enschede, Museum de Fundatie Heino,, Van Reekum Museum Apeldoorn, Fries Museum Leeuwarden, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and in Ireland in the Limerick City Gallery of Art Limerick and the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo.  

André Stitt was commissioned by Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown to produce a new body of work ’Everybody Knows This is Nowhere’ in which he uses painting and text to recall his formative experiences and applies these experiences in a response to the Craigavon area.

Stitt carried out a series of site visits and explorations, building up a psychogeograhic experience of Craigavon and applied this to the wider context of trauma and conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. The exhibition is the culmination of a site-specific exploration investigating memory and the interrogation of space as a primary vehicle for tracing its repression and recovery.

He says: ‘In many ways my response to Craigavon has been a journey back into my own past, trying to make sense of what the place, and by extension, Northern Ireland means to me today.  In the process I have inevitably confronted some difficult memories, truths, and experiences within myself. And, like the residues of conflict that saturate Northern Ireland, I felt that there was no going forward without going back and confronting the past of my own almost place, the place I almost belong.’

Stitt’s approach to the new work emanates from the perspective of his experience as a performance artist, the artist is identified with a strain of performance known as ‘akshun’ encompassing visual art and art action. His work focuses on difficult and traumatic themes; issues of oppression, freedom, coercion, subversion, experiences of alienation, appropriation of cultures, globalisation and communal conflict. His work physically and emotionally embodies the divisive forces of capitalism and materialist addiction, processes of building and disintegration and the resulting journey toward redemption.

Layering, erasure and ‘scouring’ techniques that have been used in the creation of the work consider the performance of painting as the physical manifestation of the post-colonial condition.

Born in Belfast, Stitt is considered one of Europe's foremost performance and interdisciplinary artists. He has worked as an experimental artist since 1976 creating hundreds of unique works at major galleries, festivals, alternative venues and sites specific throughout the world including the Venice Biennale 2005, The Drawing Centre, New York, 2006 and Artspace, Sydney 2007. His artistic output includes performance art, painting, drawing, installation, digital print, video, photography, and relational activity. He also produces music and tours with his band The Panacea Society.

Stitt's uncompromising style has been variously described as "..enigmatic and corruptive ... unmissible" [Time Out, London]  "..fierce integrity, immediate, spontaneous, releasing" [High Performance, USA] - Performance Magazine [UK] has described him as "..perhaps our shaman who is prepared to explore what Most of us would not care to be let alone try to express" “..the nearest thing Britain has to a genuine indigenous cult performer." – “Art’s best kept secret and last live wire” [ND Magazine, USA]. There are several books published about his life and work. 

An exhibition catalogue accompanies the work. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is an 80 page, full colour, hardback catalogue, published 2009 with introduction, 'Hermetic Traces of Place' by Megan Johnston and essay 'Nowhere Between Then And Now' by Dr. Justin McKeown'.

ISBN 978-0-9558649-4-0

Highlanes Gallery and Millenium Court Arts Centre are delighted to announce a new exhibition of paintings by painter Richard Gorman. The exhibition entitled Shuffle opens at Highlanes Gallery in July and then at Millenium Court Arts Centre in October and travels to the Ashford Gallery at the Royal Hibernian Academy in March, 2010.

Richard says of the new work: The paintings I am making at the moment explore the interrelationships with overlapping flat shapes and in turn those relationships with the edge of the picture plane. The oil paint is applied quite flatly on to gessoed linen canvas. April 2009

Gorman was educated in Ireland but has lived and worked in Milan since the 1980s. During that decade, having abandoned the residual figuration of his earliest work, Gorman's paintings were animated by the frantic surface pace of an anxious line which skittered over or ploughed through impacting plates of muted colour.

Throughout the 90s, however, the role of line drawing receded and his naturally understated gifts as a colourist became even more evident. Since then his work has drawn much of its power from the compositional tension between increasingly prominent and boldly simplified, irregular blocks of colour. Gorman has exhibited widely and regularly since the mid-1980s, especially in Dublin, London, Milan and Tokyo. Frequent and extended visits to Japan have notably influenced his working methods and materials, most memorably in a series of highly successful large-scale works executed on handmade washi paper which he produced in western Japan in 1999.

Recent international exhibitions have included solo shows at Itami City Gallery of Art and Mitaka City Art Foundation in Japan in 1999 and the Koriyama Museum, Japan in 2003. Gorman has also, over the past few years, participated in group shows at Der Spiegel Galerie, Cologne; an exhibition of contemporary Irish drawings, A Measured Quietude, which toured the Berkeley Art Museum, California and The Drawing Center, New York; He is represented in many collections, both public and private in Europe, the UK, Ireland and Japan. 

MCAC is thrilled to present four new works by the internationally known feminist arts group the Guerrilla Girls. With this exhibition, MCAC launches an all-Ireland Guerrilla Girl Tour of the new work, which will go on to Cork and Dublin.

The project is a collaboration with MCAC; the Glucksman Gallery, Cork; the University of Ulster, Belfast; the National College of Art & Design, Dublin and UCD.

In April 2009 the Guerrilla Girls presented ‘gigs’ throughout Ireland as part of the research project that informed this newly commissioned work. The project aimed to create a lens through which power and powerlessness were identified, gender examined and issues about women in contemporary Irish society could be discussed. 

MCAC Director and exhibition curator Megan Johnston explains that the “project is historic and significant in relation to the museum and galleries of Ireland-both North and South. These important artists have something very important to reveal to us in the visual arts sector, as they comment on the status not only of artists who are female but also on gender, race, nationality and religion in contemporary society. To participate in the Guerrilla Girls project will be a once in a lifetime opportunity to see art history in the making”.

The exhibition forms part of a wider programme of discussions and workshops around female representation in the arts and activism in general.

29th September – 7.00pm Panel Discussion at the University College, Dublin 
Lecture Theatre M, Belfield, Dublin 4. Panelists Include: The Guerrilla Girls, the Director of the National Women’s Council and journalist Susan McKay, Head of Cultural Policy and Arts Management at UCD, Pat Cooke and Catherine Marshall, Head of Collections at IMMA.  Discussion is open to students and members of the public.

1 October – 7.30-9pm: Opening night of Exhibition of New Work, Millennium Court Arts Centre

2 October - Activist workshop – University of Ulster, Belfast 
The Guerrilla Girls will conduct a workshop where they will assist participants to produce their own activism projects on issues that are important to them. Open to students and members of the public. 

Formed in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls explore such taboo subjects as feminism and fashion, attempting to achieve equality of the sexes and “races” in art, politics, film, and popular culture, and so calling themselves the ‘Conscience of the Art World’. They wear gorilla masks in public, to conceal their identities, and place the focus on issues rather than personalities, and work collectively and anonymously, to produce posters, films, billboards, public actions, books and other projects.

The Guerrilla Girls exhibition and tour highlights MCAC’s commitment to the delivery of a critically acclaimed artistic programme with the aim of creating a vibrant and unique context in which to cultivate and enhance the cultural environment of the community.

Template 2.0: An Exhibition of Digital Art 
21 August 2009 – 24 September 2009

tem•plate n. 2 Computer Science. A document or file having a preset format, used as a starting point for a particular application so that the format does not have to be recreated each time it is used. 

The Millennium Court Arts Centre presents an ambitious interdisciplinary multi format exhibition co-curated by Joe Gilmore and Chris Murphy with work by internationally respected digital artists. The exhibition forms part of the programme for ISEA 2009, a digital arts conference hosted by the University of Ulster in August. 

'Template' presents current tendencies in visual and digital art by interdisciplinary artists working in the fields of digital media. Works are featured from a cross-section of digital artists including Tina Frank (Austria), Alorenz (Germany), Mark Fell (UK), and Velluminous (USA). The artists are pioneers in the field of web-based and digital art and all have exhibited internationally. They explore the boundaries between the 'virtual' world within the computer and the 'real' world outside it. Their work, which is often freely available via the internet, raises questions of ownership, challenging established artistic models of consumption.

The artists featured embrace and explore the computer as a central method for creating their work. This vibrant digital playground forms the basis of the exhibition, which engages and challenges the audience's perception of what digital art might be. Through the juxtaposition of web-based artworks, screen based works, printed works and generative pieces (whose form is constantly evolving), Template 2.0 offers an exciting opportunity to present some of the world's leading digital artists to a Northern Ireland audience.
MCAC is part of a group of leading venues that are now interfacing with publics that feel comfortable with new media and most importantly are providing new avenues of access into museums and galleries via relevant creative experiences. This is part of MCAC’s ongoing interest in engaging audiences with new technology, including our new online social network site on Facebook. To accompany this exhibition MCAC has commissioned Murphy to create an iPod interactive tour. While commonplace in many galleries worldwide, interactive mediation devices are not widely utilised in Ireland. With the arrival of these new technologies organisations now have an opportunity to present their work (collections or temporary exhibitions) in new and increasingly innovative ways. 

ISEA, the Inter-Society of Electronic arts, is an international non-profit organisation fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals situated at the interface between arts, science and digital technologies. Their membership and collaborators consists of a wide range of individuals and institutions involved in the creative, theoretical and technological aspects of electronic arts.

Chris Murphy is co-founder of Fällt, an independent publishing house specializing in experimental music, fine art, design and criticism. Joe Gilmore is a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer working in the fields of computer music, video and algorithmic art.

The Millennium Court Arts Centre is pleased to present a body of stunning new work by Dundalk based ceramist Frances Lambe. The exhibition has been co-commissioned by MCAC and the Basement Gallery in Dundalk and this partnership represents MCAC’s strong interest in and commitment to contemporary craft and design and ongoing support in the creation and promotion of new work by innovative designer-makers.

Lambe draws inspiration from a convergence of contrasting sources. This new body of work springs from visual research into disparate areas interest including geography, biology, botany and astronomy, highlighting Lambe’s fascination with the visual ‘inter-relatedness’ of microscopic life.

In the exhibition’s catalogue essay Eleanor Flegg writes, “Lambe’s ceramic forms describe an underwater world. Their purity of form recalls stones that have been polished by the movement of water and sand. They describe relationships between land and sea: drumlins sculpted by the retreating ice, the sweep of eroded rock. Others reference the microscopic, the skeletal remains of tiny sea creatures. Some are displayed in multiples, suspended in undulating shoals or appearing to slip down the surface of the wall. Larger pieces rock on rounded bases, their surfaces pierced with a patterning that recalls both charts and constellations. The work has a depth and integrity that goes beyond its biomorphic grace: these are meeting points, recollections between air, sea and land. They describe the way that we navigate the worlds below and above the surface of the water.”

By exploring a counterpoint of opposites, Lambe seeks to engage the viewer in a visual dialogue and tactile investigation, through a subtle variation of media and texture. Lambe presents a dichotomy of approaches with visual inquiry into opposite concepts such as smooth/ textured, minimal/ intricate, single/ multiple, convex/ concave and microscopic/ vast. The sphere, the oval and undulating forms underpin Lambe’s visual language and the form of each piece is the prime focus. The constructed walls form a taut ‘membrane’ between the inner and exterior space. Holes punctuate the surface and link interior to exterior.

Lambe describes her own process as, ‘turning mud into stone’ and as a result the intensively beautiful pieces that are created by Lambe have an organic quality – the work seems to have evolved in a geological process rather than have been made. 

Lambe is an award-winning artist whose work has been exhibited both internationally and extensively throughout Ireland. Her work was selected for exhibition for ‘Image of Longing’ at the National Craft Gallery, Kilkenny in 2008 and was a guest artist at the Ceramics Ireland International Festival in Kilkenny. She has also shown with the Crafts Council of Ireland at SOFA, in Chicago. Her work is in public and private collections including the National Museum of Ireland, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs in Belfast and Tokyo and Louth County Council.  

MCAC is pleased to present new work by Belfast-based artist Jill McKeown completed during her 2008/2009 in-house residency. 

McKeown’s work examines relationships between memory, the passing of time and associations with place.  This new body of work, which represents MCAC’s first solo print show, explores and measures time and place by observing networks, associations and mapping. The artist explains that “in mathematics and physics, a small-world network is a type of mathematical graph. When this network is used where nodes represent people and edges connect people that know each other this captures the small world phenomenon of strangers being linked by a mutual acquaintance.”

Within this context Mckeown has been observing and photographing crowd scenes, in particular at stations or junctions where there is a daily repetitive traffic of people.  The residency at MCAC enabled the artist to spend time ‘collecting’ images and ‘gathering’ material, through photography and drawings, text and ideas, which then formed the starting point to a new body of work. McKeown describes the process as an extension of her previous work as well as a new departure. “For some time my work has been based on archiving memory and place.  With this residency I wanted to focus on new research. While still relating to place and in some ways memory, I have concentrated more on the transient passing of time and interconnectedness of people. Exploring how people become connected through a network of associations and how individuals inhabit space”. 

This creative experimentation and development has culminated in a series of prints and artist’s books, which provides the foundation for the Small World exhibition. 

McKeown studied at the University of Ulster, Belfast receiving an MA Fine & Applied Art in 1997.  Since leaving college she has undertaken artists residencies in Wisconsin, Ohio, Maine, Seattle, New York, Washington DC, Connecticut, Venice, Italy, Annaghmakerrig, Cushendall and Clo Ceardlann, Donegal.  She has exhibited in solo and group shows in Ireland, America, UK, Europe, Egypt, China and Japan.  In December 2008, McKeown was awarded the Leonie King Mid-Career Artist Award selected by Robert Kennan of Bonhams Auctioneers, London. 

Reflecting the notion of ‘a sense of place’, artists from, or working in the local area were invited to submit work concerned with identity, memory and / or the socioeconomic, political or historical issues found in South Ulster.

The work ranges from painting, sculpture and photography to video and digital installation. Exhibiting artists include Katheryn Nelson, Paul Hamilton, Damien Magee, Jonathan Cordner, Danielle Barton, Timothy A Doak, Minouche Wojaechowski, Peter Surginor, Gwen Stevenson, Paul King, Sonya Whitefield, Johnny McKerr, Eddie Emerson and Richard McNabb.

The Exhibition was selected by a specially invited panel comprising of Catherine Marshall, Head of Collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Megan Johnson, Arts Director of MCAC; Emma Wilson, Craigavon Borough Council Arts Development Officer; Dr Suzanne Lyle, Head of Visual Arts at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland; and Feargal O’Malley, Exhibitions Officer at Ormeau Baths Gallery and Artist.

MCAC is thrilled to host a contextual retrospective exhibition for the internationally known artists the Guerrilla Girls. The MCAC exhibition will present posters and photographs that document the history of the Guerrilla Girls while also launching an all-Ireland Guerrilla Girl Research Tour. In April, the Guerrilla Girls will present ‘gigs’ in Belfast, Portadown, Cork, Dublin and Kilkenny. The tour is a research project that will inform MCAC-instigated new work which will then be shown at MCAC in October 2009 and the co-commissioning venues in 2010.

Formed in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls explore such taboo subjects as feminism and fashion, attempting to achieve equality of the sexes and “races” in art, politics, film, and popular culture, and so calling themselves the ‘Conscience of the Art World’. They wear gorilla masks in public, to conceal their identities, and place the focus on issues rather than personalities, and work collectively and anonymously, to produce posters, films, billboards, public actions, books and other projects.

The Guerrilla Girls Research and New Work project is a collaboration between leading visual arts organisations and in partnership with many others. The Commissioning organisations are Millennium Court Arts Centre, Glucksman Gallery, Cork, the University of Ulster, Belfast and the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. The overall project aims to be a lens through which power and powerlessness is identified, gender examined and issues about women in contemporary society are discussed. 

Commissioner and organiser Megan Johnston, Arts Director at MCAC, explains that the project ‘is historic and significant in relation to the museum and galleries of Ireland-both North and South. These seminal artists have something very important to teach all of us in the visual arts sector, as they comment on the status not only of artists who are female but also on gender, race, nationality and religion in contemporary society. I encourage anyone to come and participate in the live gigs and experience this once in a lifetime opportunity to see art history in the making’. 

The Guerrilla Girls exhibition and tour highlights MCAC’s commitment to the delivery of a critically acclaimed artistic programme with the aim of creating a vibrant and unique context in which to cultivate and enhance the cultural environment of the community.

All-Ireland Guerrilla Girls Tour - A Series of Performance Gigs:
31 March Belfast, University of Ulster, Conor Lecture Theatre, 1:00 – 2:00 pm
31 March Portadown, MCAC, 7:00 – 8:30 pm
1 April Glucksman Gallery, Cork
2 April National College of Art & Design, Dublin
3 April Butler Gallery, Kilkenny Castle

‘The conflicted terrain of the Irish past is occupied by two powerful grand narratives, one loyalist and protestant, the other nationalist and catholic. These furnish different and mutually antagonistic ways of telling the story of Ireland: two competing constructions of the same history. …There is no pure form of these two stories, which exist only in the range of their tellings and re-tellings, with numerous variations and difference of emphasis and nuance, across a variety of modes and media of representation…’ Graham Dawson – Making Peace with the Past – Memory Trauma and the Irish Troubles. MUP 2007

MCAC is pleased to present internationally acclaimed photographer Paul Seawright in an exhibition of new work commissioned by MCAC and based on the conflicted accounts of histories, events and language within Northern Ireland. Seawright has revisited, for the first time in 12 years, the theme of Northern Ireland as a subject for his work to produce a poignant and stunning exhibition.

Known best for his alternative visual analysis of locations and subjects dominated by mainstream media, Seawright examines in a series of new photographic works, the disparate and often conflicting narratives of Northern Irish history. Working in school classrooms and housing estates representing both traditions, he has recovered visual fragments and texts, which function as metaphors for the layering of narrative, the writing and re-writing of history, and the conflicting rhetoric of two traditions.

Like much of Seawright’s early work from Northern Ireland ‘Conflicting Account’ adopts a quasi-forensic method of image making. Justin Carville has pointed out that photographs of everyday objects in the context of the north, rescue histories and narratives that have become swamped and obscured by ‘traditional and totalising images of nationalist and unionist identity.’ In much of Seawright’s work the wider narratives of political situations are visually obscured, resonating instead through fragments and objects retrieved by the camera. In these new works everyday items, blackboards, houses, walls, bridges and shops continue to form a vocabulary of separateness and contradiction.

MCAC is pleased to present a new body of project-based work from the Dublin-born, London-based artist, Joy Gerrard. The common theme of Gerrard’s current gallery work is a concern with space, site, politics and a visual response to the city as a site of transformation.  She looks at ‘the crowd’ framed by urban space and seeks to address some fundamental questions about the changing political face of the city globally.

Both Gerrard’s public art and gallery-based works represent the complex multiplicity of human and societal relationships.  Shifting between macro and micro perspectives, she offers abstract cityscapes and crowd scenes focussing on architecturally determined spatial relations, trajectories and human flows.  These are juxtaposed with grander, relational images suggesting self-forming, interpenetrating nodes and networks.  Both suggest the ecstasy of communication, exchange and empowerment.  At the same time they present the dystopian potential of the same spaces and relations: the accumulation of risk, contestation, surveillance and control.

At MCAC, Gerrard will present a significant body of work made between 2007/9. This will include photography, film works, site-specific models and a series of drawings. The short films are exhibited on bespoke computer screens and show visualisations of the evolution and transformation of the crowd: the potent “crowding” of urban space and the inevitable “emptying out” which is its counterpoint.

Gerrard has exhibited extensively throughout Ireland, the United Kingdom and Europe and most recently, was submitted by Millennium Court Arts Centre for the AIB Award, Ireland’s most prestigious art prize, achieving short-listing. She has also just completed a major site-specific sculpture for the London School of Economics.

This MCAC exhibition presents new drawings alongside other strands of practice and will be the first time this extensive body of work is shown in Ireland. 

An exhibition catalogue accompanies the work. Space, Fear and the Multitude is a 48 page, full colour, hardback catalogue, published 2009 with essay 'A Crowd of Crowds' by Fiona Kearney, Director, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork.

ISBN 978-0-9558649-2-6

At Millennium Court Arts Centre, we have a strong commitment to contemporary craft and support the creation and promotion of new work by innovative designer-makers. So it is with great pleasure that we present over twenty new ceramic works by Belfast-based Irish ceramicist Michael Moore.

As a sculptor, Moore is interested in the construction of objects by hand and draws inspiration from visual forms within nature, such as coastlines and geological markings in landscape, exploring the changes marked by time and creating a resonance within his earth-like, abstract sculptural pieces. Known for his visceral forms of abstracted landscapes, a central theme in the new work is the concept of interaction or what essayist Audrey Whitty calls an, ‘interplay between the man-made and natural environment’. In this new work, Moore creates an inherent visual tension on several different levels.  

The first tension is one of the artwork as a static object versus one that evokes movement. Moore has successfully created sublime, sensual and sculptural ceramic pieces, while utilising form, function, line and colour, drawing in our responses to the innate movement found in the work. Secondly, Moore’s work is both intimate and sizeable in scale.  An artist-in-residency in the Canadian Rockies has inspired new, larger pieces, in size, scale and ambition, creating both a tangible presence in the gallery and an elicit response in the viewer.  A third tension is one of seduction. Moore’s work has always been incredibly striking—physically in its sensual forms and surface, and conceptually in its sophisticated Modernist influence.  It is these nuances found within the multiple visceral tensions that convey the power in Moore’s ceramic pieces.

Through this exhibition MCAC hopes to initiate craft catalysts, by supporting individual artist-makers within the craft/ design sector and develop a synergy for the promotion of an arts/ crafts milieu on a local, national, and international level. To this end, the ‘Departures’ exhibition will go on tour to Wexford Arts Centre in late Spring 2009.

MCAC and South Lough Neagh Regeneration Association are pleased to present a new body of work by Anne Burke, a London-born artist who, after spending several years living on the shores of Lough Neagh, was inspired to create a series of photographs capturing the natural and eerie beauty of the landscape. The exhibition includes a series of the photographs reproduced as large-scale prints. 

This body of work culminated in a publication entitled ‘Lip-An Lagin: The Waters of South Lough Neagh’. Lip-An Lagin is a colloquial term meaning ‘a vessel that is brimful, or that the edge of a boat is even with the surface of the water’, and is taken from Montiaghisms: Ulster Dialect words and phrases by William Luton. 

The evasive quality of Lough Neagh inspired the artist to circumnavigate the shores through a series of carefully planned walking, cycling and boating routes. The artwork includes vantage points looking out towards the Lough’s vanishing horizon and inwards towards the Lough-shore. These images express the dividing line between the Lough, sky and land and address the impact of human interaction on Lough Neagh’s landscape, whilst capturing the spirit, character and aesthetic of the landscape.

This exhibition emphasises MCAC’s support of work that investigates the local area within both rural and urban communities.

Gallery 2 

Millennium Court Arts Centre is proud to present ‘Shane Cullen, Durer and the Gallowglass, Antwerp, 1521’ a new body of work by International Irish artist Shane Cullen, a touring exhibition that explores the importance of public art in both an historical and contemporary context. The inspiration behind this project lies in a drawing by the great sixteenth century German artist Albrecht Durer that depicts a group of five standing figures – migrant mercenary soldiers from Ireland known as Gallowglass or Galloglaigh. 

Inspired by his drawing, Shane Cullen has assembled this exhibition, which includes five small sculptures, five drawings and five prints. This exhibition uses the visual and symbolic impact of Durer’s Gallowglass drawing to stimulate debate and encourage discussion on the ideas of migration, displacement and dispersion of new cultures along with the important role of artwork in the public domain. Cullen sets out to engage with and to enter into a dialogue with the public through this artwork by examining relevant contemporary social, political and philosophical issues which flow from the artwork.

The show is part of the ‘Regenerate’ partnership arts project between Armagh, Banbridge, Cookstown, Craigavon and Dungannon & South Tyrone Councils and is funded through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Art of Regeneration programme.

Organised and curated by Millennium Court Arts Centre, the show toured to the five local Boroughs from May to November 2008. Accompanying labels for the show are in English, Ulster Scots and Polish. As the show continues on tour, more languages will be added, such as Portuguese, Lithuanian and East Timorese.

MCAC is pleased to present new installation work by Northern Ireland-based artist Gwen Stevenson. The artist has created a multi-channel sound installation of seven suspended spherical forms. Each form acts as an individual sound source. The installation space is filled with the mass of the spheres and the sounds moving between the spheres. The artwork is fabricated from polystyrene, and their texture is created from a spray-painting process that results in a surface resembling stone.

The installation allows the viewer to directly interact with the artwork and the space that surrounds it with both visual and audio senses. According to the artist ‘this work is concerned with how we, as human beings, inhabit this world and experience our place in it. We live in both a physical world and a spiritual metaphysical world. Both exist within and around us but are experienced very differently. The tangible stationary bulk of the suspended spheres co-exist with the intangible environments of the sound piece.  Mass is used as a visual form to convey notions of the bounded physical domain. The unbounded metaphysical domain is conveyed by movement of sound between the forms. The tangible stationary bulk of the suspended spheres co-exist with the intangible transitory existence of the sound piece’

Infinite Mass Installation Video

Gwen Stevenson Artist's Website

MCAC is delighted to host Manifest, presenting new work by International Northern Irish artist Ronnie Hughes. It is the third and final project in a new series of exhibitions entitled Beneath the Painted Surface curated by Megan Johnston. Beneath the Painted Surface, is a series of three exhibitions that investigate the liminal (i.e. thresholds, boundaries and borderlines) and subliminal elements in the medium of painting. Three Northern Irish contemporary artists have been selected because their practice engages with these issues. Through these exhibitions, MCAC aims to provoke contemplation, dialogue and debate about the formal readings of the painted surface — colour, line, perspective and narrative. We will also engage with the artist to incite deeper examination of painting in historical, modern and post-modern eras.

Manifest is a body of new work springing from the artist’s time at the Albers’ Foundation in Conneticut in 2006 and by a further visit to the Vermont Studio Centre. These two intense residencies allowed for Hughes to develop new ideas within his practice, focusing particularly on drawing. This can be seen in the current work, with the intimacy and the quiet ‘slowness’ of the New England drawings, and stands in contract to the brashness of much of contemporary art practice. It is through this intimacy that Hughes’ engages with the boundaries between the liminal and subliminal elements of painting, finding new and undiscovered areas of investigation. 

In his illuminating essay ‘From the Stars to the Studio’, art critic Barry Schwabsky superbly elucidates the liminal and subliminal elements found in Hughes’ work. Schwabsky quotes Richard Wollheim’s ‘ “seeing-in”—the capacity for two-fold seeing whereby one can see simultaneously the physical characteristics of some marks on a surface, and what those marks add up to a picture. The painter’s way of looking teaches all of us that the best way of seeing a painting is to see it in two ways at once: to see what is there, and to see what might be there’.

Schwabsky sees this notion in relation not just to representational art but also abstraction. ‘What I have in mind is painting that is not hardcore ‘non-representation’ (or “concrete art,” as its continental proponents often used to call it) in which there would ideally exist no reference to any non-artistically-formed reality, but also not “abstracted from” reality in the manner of analytic cubism. Because his paintings do not fit into such models of abstraction, Hughes has even gone so far as to deny what might seem to be obvious, that his work is abstract. But there is still another sense of abstraction, and it is in this other realm that Hughes’s work takes form, I believe, and it is for this reason that it is particularly helpful to view his paintings with the sidereal dominion in mind’.

There are not many opportunities for artists to have a visual ‘white box’ in which they can create. MCAC prides itself on the ability to encourage the idea of offering artists the freedom to push the boundaries of their own practice. MCAC has long been interested in the creation of new bodies of work that engages with the gallery space, embracing the large open vastness of our gallery spaces. The Beneath the Painted Surface series encourages the selected artists to do so. In response, Hughes has mastered the space, light and environs to suit the work, not the other way around. His new work is masterfully sublime and unabashedly uncompromising in its effect, demands of the viewer an interaction that draws out both a cerebral challenge but also an emotional wrenching— liminal and subliminal reactions respectively. In doing so, Hughes epitomises this project.

This project has been made possible with Lottery funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, who continue to support the commissioning of new work and supporting high-quality art by Northern artists. MCAC and the artists are indebted to their support. Additionally, the Craigavon Borough Council also supported the project through partnership funding.

Artist’s Profile:

Ronnie Hughes was born in Northern Ireland in 1965 he lives and works in Sligo, Ireland. He earned an MA in Fine Art from the University of Ulster 1989 and then spent a one-year in residency in New York (PS1, 1990-91), 3-month residencies at Banff Arts Center, Canada (1994) and Bemis Arts Center, Nebraska (1997). In 2006 he spent two months at the ‘Joseph & Anni Albers Foundation’ in Connecticut and one month working at the Vermont Studio Center. 

Exhibition Catalogue Available

Gallery 2

MCAC is delighted to present ‘High Definition’, an en exhibition of selected contemporary prints from the Belfast Print Workshop that focuses on the use of colour and the process of printmaking. The Belfast Print Workshop is the longest established resource of its kind in Northern Ireland for artists wanting to work in printmaking media.

This exhibition will encompass the various means, methods and techniques that can be utilized in producing the printed image. A fine line is often drawn between craft and art in printmaking, the mechanical processes echoing an assembly line in opposition to the expressiveness inherent to this unique way of producing marks on a viewable surface. But the textures, surfaces, dents, grooves, wood-like graininess and colours that spark out while others recede, can only be achieved through printmaking.

MCAC is delighted to host ‘Ellipsis’, presenting new work by young Northern Irish artist Jennifer Trouton. It is the second project in a new series of exhibitions entitled Beneath the Painted Surface curated by Megan Johnston. Beneath the Painted Surface, is a series of three exhibitions that investigate the liminal (i.e. thresholds, boundaries and borderlines) and subliminal elements in the medium of painting. Three Northern Irish contemporary artists have been selected because their practice engages with these issues. Through these exhibitions, MCAC aims to provoke contemplation, dialogue and debate about the formal readings of the painted surface — colour, line, perspective and narrative. We will also engage with the artist to incite deeper examination of painting in historical, modern and post-modern eras.

Trouton’s work is based on a collection of abandoned possessions found by Trouton in a house, which she moved into in 2005. This house had been previously lived in by a man who left behind a fragmented inadvertent history of his life.  She calls the show ‘Ellipsis’, a word indicating a pause in speech, an unfinished thought or a trailing off into silence before the end of a sentence. It is this silence that defines the concept of Trouton’s show.

‘The paintings in this show step deep into a world of relics, of the newly departed but utterly gone.  Jennifer Trouton seems to have the gifts of a medium, reaching through the first swaying layers of the past that hang around us and bringing back old testimonies’. - Writer Polly Devlin.

Trouton’s paintings evoke auras, atmospheres and feelings. Devlin calls the new paintings ‘faint records of earlier times uncovered; old letters read with a sympathetic eye; photographs from foreign lands transmuted, the rambling notes of someone slowly losing their mind deciphered; all this can be seen or understood under the surface images presented to us, surface images which are seductive in their own right’.

The theme of ‘In-Between’ is explored through the use of space.  A yellow spiral staircase connects the floor to the ceiling; a blue wool bridge rises up and stretches across the centre of the gallery; and a curving red wool tunnel.

The artist employs wool for its warmth and tangible quality, with its therapeutic healing qualities offering non-violent associations. As an artist Jamison is constantly aware and engaging with the visual and psychological effects of colour and form on the viewer.  This technique breaks down many of the academic notions that can at times isolate and distance people from contemporary art. This is also a major role MCAC plays as both a Gallery and Art Centre in its belief that art is for everyone and altering perceptions of art.

MCAC is delighted to host ‘A Gap in the Bright’, presenting new work by young Northern Irish artist Mark McGreevy.  ‘A Gap in the Bright’ is the first project in Beneath the Painted Surface, a series of three exhibitions that investigate the liminal (i.e. thresholds, boundaries and borderlines) and subliminal elements in the medium of painting and curated by Megan Johnston. Three Northern Irish contemporary artists have been selected because their practice engages with these issues. Through these exhibitions, MCAC aims to provoke contemplation, dialogue and debate about the formal readings of the painted surface — colour, line, perspective and narrative. We will also engage with the artist to incite deeper examination of painting in historical, modern and post-modern eras.

McGreevy will undertake a creative investigation into the surface image through his process of painting, which contains real, imagined and abstracted energetic compositions combined with images from a collective conscious to the personal. McGreevy’s work is heavily influenced by images from computer games, science fiction and popular culture.  Some of the work is built upon the structure of order and its demise; other work only hints at a structured composition. The use of colour and layering techniques make these paintings take on a life of their own outside the canvases on which they are painted.

According to Patrick Murphy in his essay for this catalogue, McGreevy’s paintings appear to have ‘no volume control … they blast their presence at us, intimidating us with the scale, colour and swirling content’. There is a disarming juxtaposition in McGreevy’s work with organic patterning exploding on the canvas while the subject matter is somewhat representational yet very surreal. While McGreevy’s inspiration is influenced by images from computer games, science fiction and popular culture, Murphy calls the subject matter ‘forms [that] are in a biological blender, a nightmarish evolution into something we have not imagined’. In the subliminal sense there are autonomous, free-floating motifs meandering in and out of existence. Murphy writes that McGreevy is going visceral. He is and his work is founded in the sub-consciousness of intuition, instinctive, primitive and primeval gestures and thoughts.

There are not many opportunities for artists to have a visual or verbal ‘white box’ into which they can create. MCAC prides itself on the ability to encourage the idea of offering artists the freedom to push the boundaries of their own practice. MCAC has long been interested in the creation of new bodies of work that engages with the gallery space, embracing the large open vastness of Gallery 1. Our Beneath the Painted Surface series encourages selected artists to do so and McGreevy’s spectacular new paintings certainly permeate the gallery space.

This project has been made possible with Lottery funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, who continue to support the commissioning of new work and supporting high-quality art by Northern artists. MCAC and the artists are indebted to their support. Additionally, the Craigavon Borough Council also supported the project through partnership funding. 

Millennium Court Arts Centre is please to present the exhibition Building our Children's Futures: Best Practice in School Design, from 7 - 26 January 2008. This exhibition, curated by Marianne O'Kane Boal, showcases an architecture initiative that is designed to increase awareness and access for the general public into architectural design. It will tour to five other venues across Northern Ireland culminating at PLACE in Belfast where a publication on education and architecture will be launched.

A symposium chaired by Shane O'Toole on the subject of Best Practice in School Design will take place at MCAC on Friday 18 January.

MCAC is delighted to host the award-winning and poignant exhibition, Troubled Images, originally organised by the Linen Hall Library in Belfast. This extraordinary exhibition presents an important step in looking at post-conflict Northern Ireland through (70) posters, artifacts, essays and voice recordings. The exhibition is just the most immediately visible element of a much larger project.  The show comes with a 124- page book with 140 colour images, and a CD-ROM with 3,400 images of political posters from Northern Ireland. 

“It is a mark of the quality of contemporary Northern Irish craft that this exhibition is showing in both Belfast and Washington.  Craft in Northern Ireland is undergoing a renaissance - craftsmanship, design and innovation are of truly international quality.” Joe Kelly, Director of Craft NI

MCAC is proud to present the exhibition ‘Making Changes: Contemporary Craft in Northern Ireland’.  The exhibition, was first launched in July 2007 entitled ‘Made in Northern Ireland: A Dynamic of Change’, as part of the ‘Rediscover Northern Ireland’ programme at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, DC Washington, USA and was visited by over 44,000 people. It has since been more recently shown at Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast and has now come to Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown.

Represented in the exhibition are over 30 craft makers from across Northern Ireland while the exhibits feature examples of cutting-edge textile design, silverware, ceramics and jewellery.  

Among them are the internationally-acclaimed County Down silversmiths, father and daughter, Michael McCrory and Cara Murphy. Michael and Cara’s work is highly innovative in its design and uses both traditional techniques and state-of-the-art technology. Their successful careers illustrate the wealth of talented craftspeople who are leading the way in Northern Ireland’s craft sector.
 
The exhibition is representative of three important areas of contemporary craft currently created in Northern Ireland – from signature practice to innovative and ground-breaking research in the Applied Arts. 

The first of these areas is entitled Method in the Making: presents work from nine of the finest individual designer-makers in Northern Ireland reflecting different mediums of contemporary practice. The second, Re-inventing Linen examines and explores new definitions of our ideas of this traditional Irish fabric through time. Finally, Contemporary Souvenir presents new academic research as a series of working models and manifestations that challenge the viewer’s notions of souvenir and Irish kitsch. 

The exhibition aims to unearth and celebrate challenging artistic practices as well as examine new technology and processes in design and craft currently being employed by designer-makers.  Key notions explored in the show include the creation of authored and non-authored work; ideas of memory, history and identity; the role of concept, process and production; and work that is hand-made versus machine-made. The purpose is to demonstrate those aspects of the sector that reflect high-quality, creative, innovative and challenging individual craft practice at a national and international level.

Making Changes: Contemporary Craft in Northern Ireland is curated by Megan Johnston, Karen Fleming and Trish Bedford. Both shows are made possible by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Department of Culture, Arts & Leisure and the University of Ulster.   

MCAC is proud to present this exciting new project entitled ‘no-one’s not from everywhere’ by London based Irish artist Nick Stewart, known for his work with performance and temporary installation. 

Nick Stewart's project, ‘no-one's not from everywhere’, encompasses an artist's book, complimented by a public artwork conceived by the artist specifically for Portadown.
 
In 2003 he began work on a project, which would lead to the creation of a temporary archive of recordings resulting from conversations held with some 55 Irish artists. These recordings were in turn further refined to create the text for the book and exhibition project, ‘no-one’s not from everywhere’.  The conversations explored all aspects of identity and place from the point of view of the personal experience of being born and brought up in Ireland. The recordings were sampled to produce a much-reduced text as a stand-alone artwork. The exhibition explore different formal manifestations of this text. The book will provide a fixed and definitive version.

In June, in Portadown, the artist make a temporary public artworks, a tentative intervention in the urban fabric of the town. For this work, ‘no one’s not from everywhere’, the selected texts will then be stencilled onto walls, pavements etc at the selected sites using water soluble paint. A key showing where each quote is sited will be available to the public at the gallery.

This new and extraordinary work by Nick Stewart emphasises MCAC’s ongoing determination to alter perceptions and promote creativity.  

For images of the public works follow the link to the artist's website

The book is available at to buy at MCAC's reception.

MCAC is delighted to host the exhibition and launch of ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ and the publication ‘Cloth’— a visual and verbal collaboration by Rita Duffy and Paul Muldoon.  This is the second exhibition and book in a two-part series of new work entitled ‘Interrogating Contested Spaces’ involving the collaboration of major Northern Irish visual and verbal artists.

This exhibition engages with the concepts of compassion and empathy and the role of art in post-conflict society.  For this project, one of Northern Ireland’s most well known painters, Rita Duffy, was commissioned to create new paintings that become the visual manifestations of this interrogation. The Pulitzer Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon was commissioned to write a piece that examines the legacy of this process in transition, looking mainly at Portadown. The aim is for the book and exhibition to create connections through verbal and visual communications in relation to these ideas in a Northern Ireland context. 

Luxus is Visual and Verbal Collaboration by Victor Sloan and Glenn Patterson.  It is the first exhibition & book in a two-part series of new work entitled ‘Interrogating Contested Spaces’ involving the collaboration of major Northern Irish visual and verbal artists.  The aim is create dialogue and inform discourse between rural and urban disputed places, between creator and participant/viewer, between the urban regenerator and the general public and finally between the visual and verbal interpretations or creations.

While primarily looking at Berlin, and tangentially Portadown, the first project ‘Luxus’, by Victor Sloan and Glenn Patterson, engages with the notion of The City in urban renewal. These urban spaces share notions of ‘locality’ in relation to common post-conflict spaces. Issues regarding territory and power structures pervade our psyche and the book/exhibition project aims to verbalise and visualise this change in social process and transition.  Taking Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood as the background the artists examine the process of what is luxus (luxury). 

For this project internationally known photographer Sloan and acclaimed Northern Irish writer Patterson were commissioned to create new images and text, which become the visual and verbal manifestations of this interrogation.  The images are primarily from the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, most of which is being turned into new luxury apartments.  Located in this area is a strange little bar called ‘Luxus’, a rundown establishment that emits many sentiments but none of them reflect luxury.

In this new work, digital manipulation supersedes the physical mark making of Sloan’s earlier artworks.  Instead of the intentional self-made scratches, marks and blemishes for which Sloan is so well known, these new images contain more discreet and subtle changes that would only become obvious to the a viewer who has seen the original photograph. Additionally, the images are blown up to a large scale for the exhibition, producing noise and grain on the surface.  The end result lends itself to Sloan’s well-known style, but this time the marks are unintentional and are created digitally rather than by hand.  There is an immediacy and spontaneity that capture an impression and feeling of a single moment in a certain time and place.  Sloan’s approach to subject matter has not necessarily changed but the process has moved from a physical to digital landscape with work that still very much harnesses the haunted and anxious moods of the artist’s own visual landscape.  Sloan has also produced a video piece that can be placed within the context of the redevelopment East Berlin and how specific urban spaces remain authentic and original (or not) with within the contemporary urban development.

For this project Patterson’s observant writing style complements the exhibition’s artwork and concept.  Patterson is known for his critical analysis of social interaction within different communities and his poignant and witty commentaries. The text looks at the city of Berlin, the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, the Luxus bar and the people that frequent it.  Like a social voyeur Patterson offers the reader an offbeat tour along a less travelled path through one of Europe’s most engaging and remarkable cities, observing the remnants of the DDR, The Second World War and the fascinating characters that exist within this ‘altered state’.

MCAC is delighted to host ‘Re-Generation’, a group show by nationally and internationally known artists who are currently working on the ‘Regenerate’ artists’ residency project in collaboration with Craigavon Borough Council’s Arts Development Department.

The artists are placed in local areas in Craigavon, Banbridge, Armagh, Dungannon, Cookstown and South Tyrone. The ‘Regenerate’ project places artists within the community with the idea to encourage people to look at their locality in a different way and express their ideas and thoughts about making positive changes to their area.  All of the artists participate in socially engaged artistic practice, they include Mike Hogg - Philip Napier (Carbon Designs), Peter Richards - Ian Charlesworth (Average Inc), Factotum, Paddy Bloomer - Nicky Keogh (Tattered Dandelions) and individuals Lesley Yendell, Yvonne Sullivan and Brian Maguire.

The exhibition will present current artwork as well as a description of the research and process each residency will take in each local area. This exhibition is supported by the Art of Regeneration Programme, through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland National Lottery Fund and the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure.

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present ‘Fading Fast’ an exhibition of new work by internationally known Irish artist Alan Phelan. At the core of this exhibition are challenges to masculinity, identity, and perceptions of history. This is articulated through a base concept of ‘blending-in’ - a term that comes from a ‘stealth’ industry that seeks to modify or camouflage technology.

For more information about this exhibition and work of Alan Phelan follow the link to the artist's website

A publication entitled 'Bio' accompanies the exhibition, and documents Phelan’s projects over the past ten years. It traces eleven projects, each documented with a specially commissioned text by eleven different writers, including Maria Fusco, Ciarán Bennett and Nataša Petrešin. 

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present ‘Frank Gehry, Architect: Designs for Museums’. This is the first major exhibition of the architect’s work in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Originally organised at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, the show toured to The Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. The project has received National Lottery funding through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Architecture Special Initiative to tour to MCAC,

Frank Gehry’s designs for museums have made him one of the pre-eminent architects of the twentieth century. His museums include the Cabrillo Marine Museum in San Pedro; The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota; and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Northern Spain.

The exhibition features photographs, models, installations, 3D video of Gehry’s architecture focusing on museum spaces and examples of his sculpture and furniture. It emphasises both the function of Gehry’s sculptural exteriors, which set the tone for the artistic and historical experience within, along with his equally ground breaking interiors, which can be regarded as works of art in themselves. There are four main sections in the exhibition—Contexts for Museums, Complex Exteriors, Galleries with Character, and Technology.

The show is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Architecture Special Initiative, Craigavon Borough Council, Arts & Business, Harry Porter Architects, Portadown Architects Group and High Street Mall.  

Passage | New Work by Brian Kennedy
9 February- 18 March 2006 

MCAC is proud to present ‘Passage’ an exhibition of new work by international artist Brian Kennedy. As an artist Kennedy covers a broad spectrum of mediums including performance, sculpture, photography and installation. For his new installation, which has been made specifically for the Millennium Court Arts Centre, Kennedy will explore the concept of a journey.  Integral to Kennedy’s work, the journey can be a physical one to a new country but it can also be a journey through the mind, time and place. 

Last year, during a residency in Berlin, Kennedy investigated the art of Romanticism and Symbolism and how it placed a greater importance in creating a recognizable symbol rather than creating a revered painting. In this case the symbol Kennedy has chosen to represent the journey is skeletal frame of a curragh (kindly on loan to MCAC from Lough Neagh Boating Heritage Association & Community Foundation for Northern Ireland) hanging from the ceiling of Gallery 1 and surrounded by a series of large-scale cardboard islands. The boat was a symbol often used by the Romantic and Symbolist painters. The strange sails of ships arriving after a long voyage appear in the work of German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich.  Another example is the boat carrying a body to the island of the dead by the Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Bocklin. The island pieces surrounding the boat emit a sound installation of wind and water creating the haunting atmosphere of a ghost ship, conjuring romantic images of the poem ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the ‘Marie Celeste’ within the gallery space.

After leaving college Kennedy worked as a lobster fisherman, fishing in a curragh under the Cliffs of Moher in Co. Clare. The boat, more than any other form of transport, represents for him a way of discovery. Islands are another element that has fascinated him. The islands that appear in this artist’s visual landscape range from islands off the west coast of Ireland seen from the curragh, or those he saw last year around New Zealand. Earlier this year Brian documented the famous Twelve Apostles and other islands along the Great Ocean Road in Australia. The installation at MCAC is designed to both bring together and explore these various elements.

In Gallery 2 there will be an exhibition of photographs of golden eggs. Kennedy uses the golden egg to document his travels. Sometimes the egg is used to highlight a beautiful shape, as in the boulder rocks in New Zealand. At other times it becomes a decorative element as seen in photographs from Chinatown in San Francisco. In photographs from an Etruscan burial site the eggs refer to a sense of history; while those on top of a termite mound highlight strange shapes in the red desert of Australia.  The pieces are real gilded hard-boiled eggs and are always left behind for others to discover and make of them what they will. 

This show is the third and final exhibition in the ‘Human Condition: Human Responses’ series celebrating the human desire for adventure, discovery and enlightenment.

Dermot Seymour: The Bloated Inability to eat Flags, Selected Works 1983 - 2004

MCAC is honoured to launch this mini-retrospective of Belfast-born artist, Dermot Seymour. Internationally acclaimed painter and draftsman, he has exhibited all over the world. The work of Seymour can often be described as surreal but also possesses a definite sense of realism. 

This retrospective brings together both a personal and social diary of change, development and altered perceptions of the artist’s visual landscape. The exhibition also serves as both a powerful social commentary and celebration of one of Northern Ireland’s great visual artists.

This is the first of four exhibitions commissioned by MCAC. The series is entitled ‘Inverting Conventions’ and is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Lottery Fund. 

There is an accompanying exhibition catalogue, with essays by Irish columnist Susan McKay and Queens University, Belfast, Sociologist Jim Smyth. 

Catalogue available from MCAC reception: £5

MCAC is proud to present ‘Hidden Dips’ an installation by Conor Mc Feely, one of Northern Ireland’s most interesting installation and video artists.  Through the use of three-dimensional works, video projection, ultraviolet light and mixed media Mc Feely has created an environment where both meaning and irony co-exist.  Although the overall installation is made up of a series of disparate elements they are all interrelated, constructed together as a single unit.  A common theme running throughout the show is one of parallel meanings.  There are two roads, two ways of seeing, two leaves of conceptual creative processes as well as multiple meanings.  

The term ‘Hidden Dips’ is derived from existing traffic signs that warn motorists of invisible depressions and hollows in the road ahead.  This relates to the video element of the show, which contains footage of unapproved border roads between the North and the Republic of Ireland, i.e. it is illegal to drive on them. This warning can be read both metaphorically and literally which in turn emphasises the concept of the show where the viewer is presented with the choice of just seeing what is on the surface or to look at what lies beneath. 

The notion of conceptually ‘unapproved’ or no go areas are echoed in certain spaces in Craigavon, therefore connecting and making the show more relevant for local viewers while also being a universal theme. 

The experience of the work is accessible on various levels not least the aesthetic.  And while its intent is serious, at its centre lies an absurdist humour.  This again underlines the parallel meanings presented. This is most prominent with the footage of Mc Feely himself (via the use of video post-production) endowed with the power to transmit lightning bolts of energy from a comically enlarged head.  The images are broken up by glimpses of the Third Reich that conjure up both feelings of dread and the ridiculous.  The video works along parallel lines with the concept of man striving for the power of the superman.  Mc Feely also uses photographic images of the Mount Matterhorn in the Pennine Alps, Switzerland, which is associated with both romanticism and fascism again referring to the parallel meaning paradox of  ‘Hidden Dips’.

Information coming soon...

Banks of the Bann | Barbara Freeman & Paul Wilson
31 March – 28 May 2005

MCAC is proud to present ‘Banks of the Bann’ the fourth and final of the ‘Inverting Conventions’ exhibitions.  This exhibition epitomises the term “Inverting Conventions’ by demonstrating how art can make one see the familiar and mundane through fresh and inquisitive eyes. ‘Banks of the Bann’ is the third collaboration between Belfast based Artist Barbara Freeman and the Downpatrick Composer Paul Wilson. Together they have produced an installation that explores the sounds and images of the River Bann in a way that emphasises the majesty and mystery that surrounds the river.

The exhibition consists of a structure of hanging steel plates, which are wired for sound and connected to a complex of miniature cameras, loudspeakers and a computer system programmed to create sounds triggered by the viewer’s presence.  These sounds never repeat themselves and vary in audio-level depending on how close you are to the piece. This creates a natural interaction between the artwork and the viewer. It is a very significant metaphor for the overall show as the installation itself bridges the gap from the outside world of nature and chaos to the gallery space, which tames and investigates these forces.  The gallery space in turn bridges the void between art and the viewer, opening them up to a new way of seeing.

Also as part of the exhibition Freeman has created a series of small paintings based on digital photographs of the bridges crossing the Bann at different stages.  She creates these paintings with a combination of computer colour analysis and traditional painting methods, a process that merges the acts of both construction and deconstruction. 

In his essay for the exhibition catalogue, Art Historian David Brett describes a key element of the installation stating “We never listen half so well as when we are trying to identify the source of the sound.  Think of the fugitive at night in a forest”. By using sound as an element of the piece Freeman and Wilson force the viewer to listen beyond what we expect to hear.  They do this through a constantly transforming soundtrack that unites poetry, recordings of the river and surrounding noises, which creates the impression that one is hearing the very soul of the river.

This exhibition not only utilises the ability of technology to imitate nature but it also allows nature to express itself within the gallery space.  Through this harmony of the art work, gallery space and the viewer, the exhibition gives emphasis to the significance of how art can be part of our everyday lives and we the viewer can take part in the expression of art.

The Artists:

Barbara Freeman has lived in Belfast for the last 25 years she has had many exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her work appears in both public and private collections.

Paul Wilson is a teacher of music technology and composition at Queens University, Belfast and has a growing list of commissions and performances.

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition

THE MOBILE MUSEUM | New Work by Eamon O’Kane
 2nd December 2004 – 22nd January 2005

The Millennium Court Arts Centre is proud to present an exhibition of new work by artist Eamon O’Kane. The show presents a wide variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and video.

In response to the MCAC space, O’Kane has created an installation that comprises of a mobile studio space in the form of a shipping crate surrounded by a series of new large-scale paintings of contemporary art museums.  The presence of the crate, which looks as if it has contained the paintings of the buildings on the surrounding walls, suggests that the exhibition is still in a state of flux. Inside is evidence of the artist’s practice, which will be added to on a daily basis including drawings sent by post, email printouts and faxes detailing the development of the work during the exhibition. The viewer is given the choice to view the artwork as it is and watching its physical development over the two-month period. 

The large monochromatic oil paintings surrounding the crate were created recently while O’Kane was on a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.  This body of work, the ‘Building Series’, is the product of the artist’s research into art and architecture.  The series further explores O’Kane’s earlier investigations into the idea of the perfect studio, by depicting ideal destinations for his work, bastions of art such as the Guggenheim and Tate Modern, which are taken out of their urban environments and re-contextualised within nature. By doing this O’Kane causes the soft and irregular organic forms to conflict with the hard decisive architectural forms. By appropriating, simplifying and modifying existing architectural structures the paintings probe the modes of and reasons for the production and dissemination of art works and the nature of the architecture used for these purposes. 

Irish Times critic Adian Dunne has written of O’Kane as an “amazingly versatile and prolific artist, adept at pretty much any form or medium he turns his hand to. For his latest exhibition, ‘Studio in the Woods’, [in 2003] he has made a series of paintings that amount to an extended meditation on the notion of an ideal artist's studio, a subject he links to Modernist architects' pursuit of the dream of the ideal building. But the remote, at times forbidding settings of these prototypical studios also raise the question of whether the artist is better placed in an ivory tower or in the midst of social space.” With his MCAC exhibition O’Kane has further developed those ideas.

In Gallery 2 O’Kane displays two video works, ‘Retrospective’ and ‘Mobile Museum’, which are fictive documentations of his work in other galleries and museums. Together with the installation in Gallery 1 these works raise questions about the supposed permanence of architecture and impermanence of art. Every exhibition that goes through a museum becomes almost like a ghost, in relation to the architecture. In museums space itself very rarely changes, internally or externally. It may be refurbished, or an extra wall built, or painted a different colour, but the space is static, while shows continue to flow through it.

With this show, MCAC launches the second of four exhibitions of new work.  The series is entitled ‘Inverting Conventions’ and is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland lottery Fund. All of the exhibitions will have a public site-specific element, which ‘invert’ the viewer-participants’ perceptions outside the ‘convention’ of what is a gallery space.  This element of ‘Inverting Conventions’ underlines MCAC’s aim to inspire and propel the creative potential of our community.  By creating artwork that ‘sits’ outside the gallery space, the artists and MCAC will demonstrate extraordinary appeal in the community and become a vital force for bringing new visitors inside the MCAC and building new audiences for contemporary art.

In response to these ideas, Part Three of the exhibition will take place outside of the galleries, with a series of signs positioned in the surrounding Craigavon area. The signs will present quotes relating to art and architecture, challenging concepts and relevancy in today’s society.  

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essay by Niamh Ann Kelly

MCAC is proud to present the fifteenth annual ‘Iontas Small Works Exhibition’. ‘Iontas’ is an open submission exhibition of small artworks by citizens of Ireland and nationals living abroad. The exhibition was organised by Sligo Art Gallery and has toured to the Hunt Museum in Limerick.

Every year ‘Iontas’ awards three prize-winners. This exhibition presents the Award Winners from 1996 – 2001. The work exhibited will be ‘small works’ with artists utilising the same criteria used when making their original submissions. (The condition is that no work may be greater than 600 mm in its greatest length or breadth).

In this year’s exhibition there are several artists who have since gone on to become well-established creators, including Eamon O’Kane. Other outstanding work includes striking photographs by the Clodagh Emoe, who won the ‘Iontas’ Travel Award in 2001, which funded a five month stay in India.  This exhibition also features emerging Irish artist Sarah O'Flaherty.

Information coming soon...

Information coming soon...

Paused, an exhibition of new work by internationally acclaimed artist Peter Richards heralds the first project of its kind to be shown at Millennium Court Arts Centre. Paused is the beginning of a series of projects initiated by MCAC to create new work that is site specific to the Craigavon community and the gallery itself. 

Working immediately with staff and resources at MCAC, Richards photographed social/civic groups and individuals within the Craigavon community using a pinhole camera to produce ten large scale photographic works. Groups collaborating with Richards on the ‘Paused’ series ranged from members of Craigavon Borough Council, a the local circus school, bingo hall community and youth groups, to a Lough Neagh fisherman.

PORTRAITS | Alice Maher

9 - 30 September, 2003

Maher presents us with' ... a dreamy, oddly recognisable world of magical transformation, endless possibilities and exceptional violence.' Aidan Dunne - The Irish Times.
' ... that sting in the tale, that way of making common place things seem rare or oddly beautiful.' Ros Drinkwater- The Sunday Business Post

The Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present 'Portraits', an exhibition of new work by one of Irelands' leading artists, Alice Maher. MCAC is fortunate to have obtained this opportunity to bring Maher's most recent photographic images to Portadown. 'Portraits', only previously exhibited in Dublin and London, signals Maher's return to Northern Ireland with her first solo show here since 1995.

Alice Maher is an artist much associated with her extraordinary use of natural, found materials to construct what has been described as ' . .. objects that both threaten and exhilarate by holding out the possibility of breaking all the rules.'-Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times. Religious iconography, mythology, fairytale and folklore have typically informed her artistic process. In this new series of photographic work, Maher re-appropriates natural material and evokes a sense of the "uncanny", to construct twelve singular, startling tableaux.

Using Renaissance portraiture as a reference and herself as the subject, Maher uses found materials to extend, transform and transgress her own body; a protagonist, in a sometimes macabre scene, encroached by nature. These unusual manifestations incorporate a duality that is integral in much of her work. They are images invested with a terrible and profound knowledge of the natural world and yet, many of the portraits express a wry humour at what is happening to the artist herself. As artist and subject, Maher becomes a bemused player in various stages of metamorphosis that occurs as the body coughs up its complex imaginings.