GOMA Gallery of Modern Art Waterford | 19th October – 24th November 2024
The Imagine Arts Festival 2024 will officially launch Tuesday 22nd October at 6.30pm with a film specially commissioned by GOMA Waterford by the Shell/ter Artist Collective (S/TAC), The Ties that Bind, projected onto the Theatre Royal building.
Join us for the launch of the Imagine Arts Festival, being opened by artist and educator Susan Connolly, followed by S/TAC’s exhibition at GOMA and live music in GOMA Gardens by Cian Daltun and Dean Flynn.
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𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙏𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝘽𝙞𝙣𝙙
Shell/ter Artist Collective (S/TAC) | Diana Copperwhite, Allyson Keehan, Niamh McGuinne, Sharon Murphy, Geraldine O’Neill.
Curated by Jenna Whelan.
The Ties that Bind is S/TAC’s fourth show to date and focuses on emotional, somatic and psychological aspects of shelter, presenting a short film The Ties that Bind, the collaborative installation The Clothesline, and a selection of works on paper to illustrate the genesis of the project which was initiated through a collaborative workshop held in the Chocolate Factory, Dublin 1.
The Ties that Bind is a short film created for Waterford’s Imagine Festival for GOMA and was filmed and edited by Fillipe Lezo with S/TAC. The clothesline can signify a variety of feminist and feminised ideas and is a deep-reaching metaphor for the ties that bind families, communities and women together. Strung together it becomes a symbol of the chaos and intersection of lives and cultures within an imposed vertical grid. The lines can be seen to embody twin notions of shelter/ exposure; concealment/revelation; reality/fiction; conscious/unconscious.
The Clothesline installation comprises a number of painted and printed textile pieces, each depicting a particular source of imagery, approach and palette associated with the members of the collective as individuals. While each carries the distinctive marks and gestures of each of the five artists of S/TAC, the whole work is unified through over-printing using colour and stencilled motifs which reference a connecting theme of exposure and masking of internal body organs. The collaborative installation acts as a symbol of shelter, connectedness and intersection which overtly plays with notions of ‘life on view’, private versus public, acts of display and exposure, domesticity and ‘women’s work’…
The works on paper were developed and facilitated by an Arts Council funded workshop, which focused on the embodiment of experience. Using mono-print and stencilling the first stage of the process which led to The Clothesline and has culminated in the film The Ties that Bind, saw an extended collaborative group including the collective, curators, scientists and individual artists create collage and layered prints on paper. These small prints were originally formed into giant capes and worn before being finally dismantled and sewn into books. In 2023, when the group was invited to exhibit in the National Gallery of Ireland, this work was further developed into The Clothesline using the concepts and processes initiated in the collaborative workshops.
Accompanying these collaborative works are a selection of pieces by each of the artists which provide some hints and suggestion to the particular significance/resonance to each and how that feeds into and is nourished by the participation and collaboration of a collective.
About the Shell/ter Artist Collective (S/TAC)
The Shell/ter Artist Collective (S/TAC) evolved organically during the pandemic 2020 and was driven by a desire of the artists to talk about the effects, both personal and professional, of a shifting and unpredictable world. In this dynamic space the artists found ways to explore, enrich and diversify their independent practice while supporting one another. The Collective explores the concept of shelter from emotional, psychological, and philosophical perspectives and previous exhibitions include ‘Shelter’ at the National Gallery of Ireland 2023 and ‘The ladder is always there’ in Draiocht in 2023/2024. Shared identity, common purpose and egalitarian values underpin much of the desire to work as a group, and the nature of this engagement continues to shift and develop.
Diana Copperwhite (RHA) is a member of Aosdána and draws particular inspiration from early Irish modernism. Her paintings explore the relationship between colours, gestures, figuration, and representation. She gives structure to the unseen world of atoms and molecules to examine the psychological and spatial interpretation of self. Layering fragmented sources that range from personal memory to science, media and internet, Copperwhite’s canvases become worlds in which the real is unreal and this unreality is in a constant state of reforming.
www.dianacopperwhite.net
Allyson Keehan is an Irish visual artist based between Ireland and Scotland. She was awarded PhD in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art in 2021 titled ‘Painting and Materiality: Three Creative Strategies for Transformation’. Her research is in the expanded field of painting and the use of drapery in art. Looking closely at veiling and artifice, her practice incorporates drapery and framing to create complex structural experiences of real and imaginary spaces. Drapery has a wealth of history relating to painting and these propositions amplify the experience of viewing and understanding.
www.allysonkeehan.ie
Niamh McGuinne‘s practice combines print, sculpture, textile, film and installation. The immersive nature of her background in paper conservation working with historical collections informs this art practice. Conceptually she is interested in the body as the protector, a shell in which to develop…and how time and growth are marked and interpreted. Her work has an element of the performative, either as a space or as costume in which to interact, which present an invitation to participate – physically or imaginatively.
www.niamhmcguinne.com
Sharon Murphy is visual artist based between Dublin and Paris whose practice is lens-based incorporating photography, video, installation and drawing. Her work investigates the boundaries between the seen / unseen, fictive / real, conscious / (sub)liminal. Drawing on a background in theatre and informed by concepts in magic realism and psychoanalysis, recurring motifs in her work include: theatre curtains; carousels; circus tents, performative sites; embodied staged spaces. Her works address uncertainty, the uncanny, the ‘there / not there’, linked to an investigation, quintessential to both photography and performance of what it is the viewer is shown or is seeing.
www.sharonmurphy.ie
Geraldine O’Neill (RHA) is a member of Aosdána and has a particular respect for and understanding of the techniques and visual language used in the history of art. She has long responded to the increasing confrontation with human engagement and relationship with the ecosystem, in particular the Anthropocene whose traces are now embedded within the geological layers of the Earth’s structure. Playing with incongruities of time and space, she juxtaposes traditional references with scientific reasoning and contemporary perspective in large-scale and small scale compositions. Her works address protection and shelter from a domestic and environmental viewpoint to emphasise the fragility of life.www.geraldineoneill.ie 
