Irish Artists brought up in Joint Course

Bea McMahon




McMahon mostly uses video and small drawings to articulate her ideas which weave a strange and boundless path between an inner reality of thought and the ordinary outside world, a world in which her version of events have a somewhat hallucinogenic feel. Even though her practice does not subscribe to an obvious visual lexicon of science, it does rely on thought process she learnt through the study of mathematics – one which exists in a state of logic and before language. Her work forces little gaps to open up, or makes a life moment to come apart into two distinct things, one of which gives way to the other, whilst retaining the memory of the world as it was before. She has chosen, simply for reasons of aptitude, visual art as a medium to explore this process – a thought process which Werner Heisenberg describes as ‘not a precise language in which one could use the normal logical patterns; it is a language that produces pictures in our mind, but together with them the notion is that the pictures have only a vague connection with reality, that they represent only a tendency toward reality’ . In her work is a withdrawal from the search to expose underlying structure towards a position that the action of thinking and feeling is an active force generating the underlying structure.

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The Bea McMahon piece we watched in the lecture was called Audience and was a short video showing someone playing a snail-infested piano. Exploring the interference attached to the making of art, or on a broader scale the interactions between actor and subject, questions of ethics and responsibility arose. Was it cruel to use snails (involuntary participants) for the sake of art?

Grace Weir



still from Turning Point


Grace Weir studied at the National College of Art and Design and also at Trinity College Dublin, where she won an award for her Masters in Multi-Media graduation project. She co-represented Ireland at the 49th International Venice Biennale in 2001 with her video installation 'around now'. She has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, most recently seen in 'Biennale! Artist film and video' at Temporarycontemporary in London, ‘As Heavy as the Heavens' at Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, in Denmark, 'Tir na nOg' at the Irish Museum of Modern Art , Missing Time at the Agnès b. cinema in Hong Kong, 'Flights of Reality' at Kettles Yard Cambridge UK, in 'Are we there yet'? at Glassbox in Paris, France, and at her solo exhibition at the John Curtin Gallery in Perth, Australia in 2002, and at the RHA Gallery in Dublin in 2000. In 2002 she was commissioned by NIFCA, the Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art in Helsinki Finland to make an interactive work ‘Little Bang' for their online gallery at www.ionic.nifca.org. Grace Weir collaborated with an astrophysicist exploring aspects of Einstein's relativity and was commissioned by Cornerhouse in Manchester UK to make two film works ‘Dust defying gravity' and ‘Bending spacetime in the basement' in regard to this. They were premiered at her solo show titled ‘a fine line' at Cornerhouse, Manchester UK in September 2003. In May 2005 she was elected a member of Aosdána. Her work is held in many collections including that of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

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In relation to her work 'the Turning Point', our class discussion turned to the framing of shots and its importance in conveying intention. The link between science and art also came up, as most of Grace Weir's work focuses on 'humanising' this relationship.

Jaki Irvine



still from Room Acoustics Revisited

Irvine currently lives and works in Dublin having spent many years in London and some time in Italy. Her works in film and video, whether in single-screen format or in more complex multi-screen installations, weave together enticing, though ultimately elusive narratives in which image, voice-over and musical score variously overlap, coalesce and diverge. These languid explorations of human interaction with the natural world, the built environment, and with other humans are suffused with a melancholic lyricism and leavened by a dark, dreamlike humour. Subjectivities split and fragment as the boundaries that separate self from other, or human from animal, become fluid or permeable. In 1995 Irvine was included in the seminal exhibition of Young British Artists, General Release, at the Venice Biennale, and she represented Ireland at the 1997 Biennale.

Her solo exhibitions include shows at Project Arts Centre (1996) and the Douglas Hyde Gallery (1999) in Dublin, Frith Street Gallery (1997, 1999) and Delfina Project Space (2001) in London, and the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, Germany (1998). She has also participated in numerous group shows throughout Europe, Australia and Japan including Sonsbeek International, Arnhem (1993), NoWhere Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (1996), White Noise, Bern Kunsthalle, (1998), Intelligence, Tate Britain (2000) and Shifting Ground: 50 Years of Irish Art at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) (2000). A major new work, The Silver Bridge, is due to be exhibited at IMMA in Spring, 2004. Irvine is represented in the collections of IMMA, the British Council and in numerous other collections, both public and private.


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Again, we spoke about her work in relation to filming technique and framing used to convey a particular intent. In Room Acoustics Revisited, Irvine addresses the issue of semiotics and meaning; she uses sheet music as an example of seeing the world 'through a straw'. Limitations of depiction and representation manifest themselves intentionally in the style of the piece, as Irvine plays with the audience and their interaction with the visual and the conceptual sides of her work.

Isabel Nolan




Dublin: Isabel Nolan at Project

And so it stays just on the edge of vision
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill.1

In his poem Aubade, Philip Larkin reflects upon the impending inevitability of death in the lonely darkness of night. He describes the moving shapes that haunt the corners of his vision. As daylight slowly strengthens, his bedroom returns to its normal shape and the presences of the previous night seem strange and out of place.

Everything I said let me explain is the title of Isabel Nolan's recent exhibition at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin. The show is a visual exploration of the thoughts and shapes that occupy the mind at night. Like Larkin, Nolan attempts to interpret how these presences morph and change, grow bright and disappear in order to be felt and understood.

One of the seven artists from the Republic of Ireland selected for this year's Venice Biennale, Nolan's work is primarily concerned with forms of representation and addresses the difficulty of attaching meaning to experience. In this exhibition, drawing is the main discipline through which she expresses her experiences of the night. Along the gallery wall, which was painted a light grey in order to soften the sterilised white, small drawings and paintings explore the shifting shapes of the night-time presence. Many of these shapes have a repeated circular motif, others are more angular. In the centre of the gallery, two mahogany tables present a series of portraits of sleeping faces and another collection of night-time shapes.

Torn from a notebook, these drawings are placed under heavy sheets of glass. They seem to be floating over the dark table top and have an abandoned, spontaneous beauty. Also on the table, a small silver screen plays a short DVD entitled Quiet please, in which most of the drawings on show are animated into a short film. This film begins with a sequence of sleeping portraits and shape drawings. The images are occasionally interrupted with fragments of handwritten text which refer to night-time thoughts. The thoughts shift from simple descriptions - "These presences vary in size, but are never very big" - to more intimate personal reflections - "How could you know what or who you are?"

As the text grows increasingly reflective, the night-time shapes begin to multiply, becoming larger on the screen, filling it completely before receding back into pulsating circles of orange, red and green. Flickering and shimmering, they are the colours seen when you close your eyes.

The tenderness Nolan expresses towards her slumbering subjects is almost palpable in her delicate Sleep sequence drawings, most especially in Sleeping dog. Whilst the exhibition offers many glimpses of intimate narratives, it simultaneously uses tools to prevent the viewer from fully absorbing them. The glass upon the table top or the newsprint that covers the text in Available ensures that elements of Nolan's night-time experiences remain private, almost contradictory.

This contradiction, between the physical intimacy of lying next to someone and the sense of distance experienced when they sleep, is prevalent in the show. Nolan has created a strong visual metaphor for the unaccountable phenomenon that separates two people, even as they lie side by side. Her drawings are an expression of the difference between distance and proximity, sleep and consciousness.

Ciara Healy is an artist and writer based at Pallas Studios; she is currently completing her Ph.D. in Irish curatorial policy at Dublin Institute of Technology.

Isabel Nolan: Everything I said let me explain, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, March - May 2005

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