Artists

Glenn Loughran

PARA-RADIO

Following on from his residency in Usher’s Island, Glenn presents PARA-RADIO: two small wooden structures which broadcast audio work designed to fit into architectural spaces along the coastal walls of the Portrane peninsula. Creating feedback loops between St Ita’s Hospital and the surrounding natural environment, PARA-RADIO broadcasts live audio soundings, recordings from St Ita’s radio archive, and audio created during workshops with service users of the NFMHS which took place in Usher’s Island in 2019.

Site 1—Installed at a mid-point along the coastal wall beside a blocked-up gate. This unit broadcasts a specially commissioned audio history of St Ita’s hospital radio by local hero STEREO JACK.

Site 2—Installed in the Cliff Shelter at the coastal entrance to St Ita’s Hospital. This work broadcasts soundings and songs from environmental themed workshops developed with NFMHS service users in Usher’s Island.

John Conway

Future Happiness

Future Happiness is a neon sign based on a sketch by John which quotes the phrase “future happiness” from Johnathan Swift’s final letter to an ailing Esther Stella Johnson, titled Stella’s Birthday, March 13, 1727. The work is displayed on the exterior of Portane Castle (locally known as Stella’s Castle). On one hand the work stands for hope, recovery,
and prosperity, especially in the historical and recent context of mental healthcare in Portrane. On the other hand it is intended as a Swiftian tribute to a perpetually elusive state of happiness: It is an invitation to consider our (in)ability to find that happiness in the present moment.

Jonathan Cummins

Compliance/Insight

Compliance/Insight brings together several works developed with service users of the NFMHS and researched during Jonathan’s Resort residency. A neon cigarette and distribution centre for tabloid newspapers of drawings of medications and food produced by the service users is located at Piper’s and Grogan’s. Six rings are on display at St Patrick’s church: The result of a further collaboration by the same group of service users with Belfast-based goldsmith Garvan Traynor.

The process of producing the rings is examined in a film installed in the church. The artworks offer an enquiry into solidarity, the passage of time, conviviality and tensions between compliance and insight. They highlight art and its processes of enquiry as fundamental to understanding our institutions, those negotiating life within and related communities of care.

Emma Finucane

FLOAT

FLOAT is a response to time spent reflecting and building on research collected while artist in residence in Usher’s Island (2019) and the Resort Residency (2020). It is an artwork that invites the local community to participate. It considers the people of Portrane / Donabate, the patients and staff of St Ita’s past and present, the existing and future patients and staff of the new NFMHS Hospital. It attempts to connect people with place, past, present and future.

FLOAT took place on Sunday 3rd October at 11am where the local community entered the sea at Tower Bay beach. The cold water held them as they floated united in their thoughts and actions to acknowledge and care for our individual and collective mental health. The result of this event is exhibited as a video projection displayed in Lynders Mobile Home Park.

Artists

Gareth Kennedy

The Origins and Uses of Round Towers

A straw bale round tower was created by Gareth Kennedy in collaboration with Master Craftsman, Eoin Donnelly in the weeks leading up to the festival, a “folk folly” of sorts this temporary 12m tower joined the towers of the Portrane skyline and was activated by a series of performances and events. The inauguration of the tower and launch of the festival was conducted by Councillor David O’Connor, Mayor of Fingal.

Gareth Kennedy, The Origins and Uses of Round Towers, Chinkwell Field, 2015

Sean Taylor

Acouscenic Soundwalk

The walk commenced at Lynders Mobile Home Park along the cliff walk to Donabate beach followed by a workshop at the Waterside Hotel. Sean Taylor conducted an Acouscenic Soundwalk using the principles of mindfulness and meditation; participants were invited to experience the landscape of the peninsula in a unique and thoughtful way.

Fiona Hallinan and Kate Strain

How to Make Sloke

A cookery performance demonstration presented by Fiona Hallinan and Kate Strain. Through alchemy, comedy and food preparation, they staged an abridged account of their experience in Portrane. The demonstration featured The Seaweed War, ulva umbilicus (aka sea lettuce), the five Liams, and the eponymous Sloke.

Maeve Connolly

The A-Z of Resort Life

Maeve Connolly presented a publication of materials and ideas relating to the work of US artist Andrea Zittel. Inspired partly by childhood memories of holidaying in trailers, Zittel creates projects such as artificial islands, customised desert habitats and mobile escape vehicles.

Artists

Alan James Burns, Entirely Hollow aside from the dark, Tower Bay Cave, Portrane, 2016

Alan-James Burns

Alan-James Burns is a visual artist working primarily through audio, video and performance. He holds a Masters in Visual Arts Practice from The Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire and a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Dublin Institute of Technology.

Selected recent exhibitions, video screenings and performances include Those Who Swim (in) The Forest, MoKS, Estonia, 2015; MEx15 Symposium, Maynooth, 2015; LUX13, Laban Center, London, 2014; SIX Degrees, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2014; and He, solo exhibition, The LAB, Dublin, 2013. Burns received a Dublin Institute of Technology Summer Studio Residency, 2016. He was awarded the Irish Residential Studio Award, Red Stables, Dublin, 2012- 2013 and will commence a residential residency at Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin, in 2017. Awards and artist grants include the Developing Creative Practice Across Borders Award, The Leonardo Programme, EU, 2014; Cavan Council Arts Act Grant, 2016, 2014, 2011 and 2009; Fire Station Digital Media Residency Award, 2012; and Arts Council Travel and Training Award, 2009.

Tables and chairs and other people, 2016

Emer Lynch

Emer Lynch is an independent curator based in Dublin. She has developed projects nationally and internationally, most recently the visual art spoken word series Foaming at the Mouth, co-curated with Tracy Hanna in Dublin and Amsterdam. Emer is a member of the seminar group The Enquiry, who recently considered ‘immateriality’ at their research event at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, with a primary focus on French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. She is Gallery Co-ordinator at mother’s tankstation limited, Dublin, and previously completed an internship as Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

Fiona Marron

Fiona Marron was born in Co. Monaghan in 1987 and now lives and works in Dublin. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Dublin Institute of Technology (2009) and an MA in Visual Arts Practice from IADT Dun Laoghaire (2013). Solo exhibitions include ‘Proving Ground’ Artbox, Dublin (2016), ‘Pivot a closed path’ Flat Time House, London (2015), ‘Co-location’ at RUA RED South Dublin Arts Centre (2013) and ‘Last and First Men’ at The Joinery, Dublin (2011). Recent group exhibitions include ‘Bandits live comfortably in the ruins’, Flat Time House, London (2016), ‘Reverse Pugin!’ at St. Cartage Hall, Lismore Caste Arts, Co. Waterford (2015), ‘In Free Circulation’ at Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin (2014), ‘Ingenious Showcase’ at The Drawing Project, Dun Laoghaire (2014) and ‘At the level of entity’ at The LAB, Dublin (2013).

Most recently she has undertaken residencies at ‘Welcome to the Neighbourhood’ Askeaton Contemporary Arts, Co.Limerick (2016) , UCD ‘Art-in-Science’ (2015- 2016), FTHo, London (2015), Creative Spark: Create Louth (2015), Firestation Artists Studios, Dublin (2015) and Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Co.Cork (2014). Amongst other publications, her work has featured in The Irish Times (2016), Art Monthly (2014) and Paper Visual Art (2012). Upcoming exhibitions include a solo presentation in Turin, Italy in November 2016.

Caroline Doolin

Caroline Doolin is a visual artist currently resident at Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin (2015-2017). Selected previous residencies include Acme Studios, London (2015) and Irish Museum of Modern Art (2013)

Doolin will develop a solo exhibition, commissioned by Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 2017. Selected recent exhibitions and events include: Periodical Review #5, Pallas Projects & NCAD Gallery, Dublin; Seachange, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway Arts Centre; The Homesickness Project, Logan, Australia (2015) Foaming at the Mouth, The Stag’s Head, Dublin; How does the group function, Enclave Projects, London; mirror source | ghost pulse, the Friary, Callan (2014) At the level of entity, The Lab, Dublin; These liquid brinks, the Guesthouse, Cork (2013).

Doolin’s writing is featured in the literary publication some mark made (2015). She has been awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Project Award (2014) and Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Digital Media Award (2012).

Michael McLoughlin

Michael McLoughlin is a visual artist working in a wide variety of media including drawing, video, sculpture and sound. Since the mid-1990’s McLoughlin has consistently developed and presented new ways of working in a social context.

McLoughlin continually explores developmental possibilities through a contemporary art practice grounded in sound, drawing and spacial consideration. His work examines the value placed on the feelings of ownership, belonging and connection experienced by both the individual and the collective. In addition, he is particularly interested in the relationship between public spaces, institutions, the public they aim to serve and the potential meeting ground with contemporary visual arts practice within these contexts.

Recent exhibitions include Cumann:An Audio Map of Drogheda, in Droichead Arts Centre and Beyond the Pale in Highlanes Gallery McLoughlin was UCD College of Social Science, Artist in Residence 2015 and a major exhibition of his work Cumann:Limerick will open on Sept 15th in Limerick City Gallery of Art.

Mike Finn

Mike Finn is a playwright, screenwriter and actor who holds an MA in Scriptwriting from the National Film School and has had over fifty scripts produced in various media. Among his plays are Pigtown (winner of the Stewart Parker Award and produced Off-Broadway), The Quiet Moment, The Crunch, and Shock & Awe, (Island Theatre Co.), Ellis Island (Theatre USF, Florida), Stories (LYT), Langered and One (Balor Theatre Co.), The Big Question (Institute of Excitement, Hampstead Theatre, London), We Are What We Witness, The Revenger’s Tragedy and Porkville (Bottom Dog) and Life In 2 Syllables (Fishamble, seen in Dublin, New York and Washington and described by The Guardian as ”ingeniously written”). Mike recently wrote the book for the musical The Unlucky Cabin Boy (Guna Nua).

For television, Mike has co-written extensively with Pat Shortt including thirty six episodes of the IFTA nominated Killinaskully, seven episodes of Mattie and the pilot of Behind The Crystal Ball. Mike wrote the radio drama It’s A Worthless Life for RTE 1 and Little Bits Left Over for Limerick 95FM. In 2017, Mike will be Theatre Artist-in-residence at the Belltable in limerick.

Ella de Burca

Through her practice Ella de Burca creates visual juxtapositions between action and language, treating language as an object, and objects as languages. She warps, swops, and pops their positions as she works with subversion to unearth the subjectiveness of memory and interpretation.

De Burca’s sculptural installations could be mistaken for theatre sets, just as her scripted performances could be mistaken for theatre.

Playing with histrionics, Ella pulls apart and re- presents hegemonic patriarchy in language and culture. Her pieces are site-specific, and often use humour as a means to illuminate dissensus. Her work lies between social and studio practice, drawing from history and place to overlap historical ghosts with contemporary voices.

Brian Cregan

Brian Cregan is a graduate of the Photography B.A. programme at the Dublin Institute of Technology. As an artist, using lens based media, he is interested in themes relating to landscape, natural history and the built environment. Ideas around a ‘sense of place’ and how it is represented are central to his work that takes the idea of the photograph as document, to build narratives around what is often overlooked or taken for granted. Recent achievements include work featured in Beyond the Pale: The Art of Revolution at Highlanes Gallery, Describing Architecture 2015, Workhouse Union, Callan, Co. Kilkenny and Greetings From Ireland at the Library Project. His work has been featured in The Irish Arts Review, The Irish Times, Dezeen, Inhabitat and Architecture Ireland.

Distinctive Repetition, resort programme 2016 — Suzanne Walsh, Who Will Silence Them, At Last?, text, 2016

Suzanne Walsh

Suzanne Walsh is a writer and audio visual artist from Wexford. Her work often queries the human animal divide and the edges of what constitutes the borders of the human self. She draws on music, ecology and literature as material and her work often has a performative element, with sound or text. She has performed in IMMA, The International Literature Festival, The New Lacanian School Congress, The Burren College of Art, and The Artists festival in Warsaw. Her writing can be found in Critical Bastards, on Fallowmedia website and in Gorse literary journal.

To read Suzanne Walsh’s Who Will Silence Them, At Last?, click here to download the 2016 booklet.

Artists

Vanessa Daws

Other Space – Underwater Explorations of the RMS Tayleur

Vanessa is a visual artist and open water swimmer based in Dublin. Vanessa’s art practice explores place through swimming. ‘Place’ being the watery space that is navigated and swam through, the littoral space surrounding and the social space created by this shared activity. Vanessa’s interest in Lambay Island started when she moved to Dublin and began swimming at Low Rock in Malahide where Lambay sits on the horizon. On September 6th 2016, Vanessa Daws became the first person to swim around Lambay, ‘The Lambay Circumnavigational Swim’ was the third swim in her project involving a series of swims to, about and around Lambay Island.

It was during her research for these swims that Vanessa heard the story about the RMS Tayleur, the pride of the White Star Line that while on its maiden voyage to Australia from Liverpool and during a stormy night in January 1854 hit rocks and sank off Lambay Island.

While on a UCD Art in Science Residency in 2015 an opportunity to learn to scuba dive with the UCD Sub Aqua club arose. Over the previous two years Vanessa was training to dive and finally managed to dive on the RMS Tayleur and film the ship in its current state in July 2017.

In 2017 Vanessa was a recipient of a Temple Bar Gallery Project Studio and was awarded a Docklands Small Grants Award, Vanessa was also commissioned to create new film work based on the Liffey as part of Port Perspectives ‘port | river | city.’ In 2015 Vanessa was selected for the UCD Art in Science Residency and was given the Neville Johnson Award as part of this residency. Vanessa was a recipient of the Artist in the Community Award from the Arts Council of Ireland and Create in 2013 and collaborated with the sea swimming community from Malahide, Co Dublin.

Catherine Barragry

Earthbound

Catherine Barragry is a Dublin-based artist who makes sculpture, performance and immersive events. Barragry studied sculpture at NCAD and went on to complete a Masters in event and performance based work in 2010. She was a resident of the Firestation Artist Studios from 2011 to 2014. Barragry has received support for her art practice from Dublin City Council and from the Arts Council of Ireland in the form of residencies and the Bursary Award. In her work Barragry often considers human survival and how revolutions of thought have altered our history. Barragry describes making art as a gesture of poetic politics.

Deirdre O’Mahony

Perishable Picnic

Research and art practice is grounded in collaborative engagements with different publics and communities. Her PhD, New Ecologies Between Rural Life and Visual Culture in the West of Ireland: History, Context, Position, and Art Practice revived a defunct rural post-office as a public space, X-PO, to reflect the complexity of dimensions – social, psychological, economic and natural – affecting place and landscape in the west of Ireland. Animated by a process of collaborative exhibition-making and the co-creation of artworks, X-PO made visible some of the invisible histories, unconscious projections and expectations underlying place-based attachments.

Subsequent research has reflected on the contemporary relevance of tacit, place-based knowledge, most recently The Village Plot at the Irish Museum of Modern Art for Grizedale Arts and she has just completed a project for Grasslands for Aarhus Capital of Culture 2017. She is currently working on a project funded by the Wellcome Trust for the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading and she will exhibit a new film commissioned by Callan Workhouse Union, The Persistent Return at Visual Carlow with the support of an Arts Council Project award. She has been awarded numerous national and international gallery and museum exhibitions, Arts Council of Ireland awards and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation international fellowship.

Alan James Burns

Entirely hollow aside from the dark

Alan James Burns is a Dublin based visual artist working in audio, video and performance. He holds a Masters in Visual Arts Practice from The Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire and a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Dublin Institute of Technology.

Selected exhibitions, video screenings and performances include Entirely hollow aside from the dark, Fingal Arts Public Art Commission, Portrane, Dublin, 2016; Those Who Swim (in) The Forest, MoKS, Estonia, 2015; MEx15 Symposium, Maynooth, 2015; SIX Degrees, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2014; LUX13, Laban Center, London, 2014; He, solo exhibition, The LAB, Dublin, 2013; At the level of entity, The LAB, Dublin, 2013; Till The Cows Come Home, solo exhibition, Cavan County Museum, 2011; To walk in a state of finality than in one of impermanence, solo exhibition, Exchange Gallery, Dublin, 2010.

Burns has also undertaken a number of artist residencies, including Fire Station Artists’ Studios Residency, commencing 2017, Dublin Institute of Technology summer studio programme, 2016; RESORT Residency, Portrane, Dublin, 2016 & 2015; MoKS, Estonia, 2014; Irish Residential Studio Award, Red Stables, Dublin, 2012-2013; Cow House Studios, Wexford, 2011; and Cyland Media Arts Lab, National Centre for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2009. Awards and artist grants include the Arts Council of Ireland Touring and Dissemination of Work Scheme, 2017; Creative Ireland grants from Sligo County Council, Cavan County Council and Clare County Council, 2017; The Leonardo Programme, EU, 2014; Cavan Council Arts Act Grant, 2016, 2014, 2011 and 2009; and Fire Station Digital Media Residency Award, 2012.

Burns is on the board for the Irish moving image online resource MExIndex. He has lectured and taught at various colleges and schools and will present papers at the forthcoming international symposiums Sounds in Space, University of Derby 2017 and Sounding Out the Space: International Conference, Dublin School of Creative Arts DIT, 2017.

Artists

Ciaran Murphy

I, See

Ciaran has produced a large series of enigmatic small-scale paintings in a variety of media. Their format and quantity evoke the feeling of unfurling a roll of negatives documenting a journey, or an encounter of an otherworldly place. The works are unsettling and fragmented; the familiar clouds, rocks and sea creatures are rendered strange, while other things are ambigiuous but familiar. Objects are in flux, things float.

At times they seem barely there, as the eye comes into focus. Throughout the residency, work was allowed to begin, gestate and recommence, and the artist acknowledges that this process allows for slippages, changes in direction, re-intrepation of meanings, forgetting and recalling, all of which adds to the dream-like sequence of these new works.

Bennie Reilly

Souvenirs of Portrane

A selection of natural curiosities collected on
the beaches of Portrane including highly unusual seashells, strange rock formations and other questionable artefacts. Bennie presented work in The Cabinet of Curiosities at Newbridge House and at Lynders Mobile Home Park. Tours of the work at Newbridge House took place each day, including a tour of the house.

A bespoke, limited-edition playing card deck featuring Bennie Reilly’s curiosities was available to visitors at Lynders and Newbridge House throughout the exhibition. The playing cards were inspired by the collecting pursuits of Fanny Cobbe at Newbridge House, who kept shells in little boxes she fashioned out of playing cards. This edition made especially for Resort Revelations 2018 also referenced the off-line leisure activities prompted by the chance to reside at Lynders Mobile Home Park.

Marie Farrington

See Level

Marie explores the surfaces and patterns associated with mobile-home parks – the corrugated textures, the striped façades, the functional domestic elements of windows and doors – through sculpture. Using plaster mixed with Portrane seawater, the medium is mixed with the site and the unremarkable becomes the monumental.

Difference Engine

Difference Engine is an evolving touring exhibition, a model of autonomous artist curation by artists Mark Cullen, Wendy Judge, Gillian Lawler and Jessica Foley. We have adopted the name Difference Engine as a kind of poetic motto for working together creatively, pragmatically and critically. We particularly enjoy Babbage’s aphorism that ‘Jamming is a form of error detection’, and take this as a slogan for our collective experimentation and collaboration.

Difference Engine operates similarly to oral storytelling, where the story changes each time it is spoken. This story is made up of visuals, objects and props, as well as words. There isn’t one set narrative, and so there is a call to the audience to build their own associations and narratives from the pieces we present and organise in the exhibition space. The works brought together through Difference Engine weave personal concerns with concepts of science, geologic time, language, architecture and economics.

Mark Cullen & Gillian Lawler

Inversion I/II

Visitors were invited to explore the Lynders Maze, made from the most typical and idiosyncratic objects of beach holidays in our western windy islands – the coloured and striped windbreaker. Hidden within the maze were a series of chambers, with sculptural inversions waiting to be discovered. The maze itself was based on an aperiodic binary tiling of the plane – a randomised process where the flip of a 50-cent coin decided the direction of each square on the maze’s grid – either diagonally up or down. Be warned – after entering you may be lost for a considerable time…