Modern Nature - 2024 Cairde Sligo Arts Festival (CSAF)
Modern Nature explored how Modern Nature is represented through photography today. It takes the late filmmaker, writer, gardener, artist, and activist Derek Jarman’s (1942- 1994) autobiographical canvas of the intermingling of art and life as its title and point of departure.
As Derek Jarman explained to the painter Maggi Hambling, his interests did not entirely square with those of a stately Victorian naturalist. “Ah, I understand completely,” she replied. “You’ve discovered modern nature”. Jarman wrote about the unlikely oasis he created in an unforgiving physical and psychological landscape.
For this exhibition, I invited four photographers who explore notions of Modern Nature, Sean Breithaupt (Lancashire), Robert Ellis (Co. Clare), Stephen Gill (UK), and Miriam O’Connor (Co. Cork), including interrelated personal, political, scientific, and psychological concerns.
This exhibition invited the viewer to contemplate Modern Nature through the lens of Ireland’s most thought-provoking photographers.
Exhibition production details:
Modern Nature, as part of the Cairde Visual Arts Program, is sponsored by the Sligo Leader Program.
Exhibition production team:
Cairde Sligo Arts Festival director: Tara McGowan
Photography Curator: Yvette Monahan
Installation design and production: Chan Kin
Print: Ballast Design
Festival Website: https://www.cairdefestival.com/events/modern-nature
Atlantic Mythologies - 2023 Cairde Sligo Arts Festival
The Atlantic Ocean derives its name ‘Sea of Atlas’ from Greek mythology, so called because it lay beyond the Atlas Mountains. The oldest mention of this name is in The Histories of Herodotus, around 450 BC. In Ireland, the Atlantic hugs over two thousand five hundred kilometres of coastline and looms as a powerful presence that pummels and caresses the rugged shoreline of the Western seaboard.
The Atlantic coast of Ireland has long held the gaze of our ancestors as they looked outward across the vast ocean into the unknown. The watery horizon shimmers with possibility beyond the edge of the land. It is a storied place, the Atlantic.
Atlantic Mythologies featured four photographers who invite the viewer to consider the mythology of this vast ocean. Cairde invited photographers who have made bodies of work along the West of Ireland, including Bertien van Manen (Co. Cork to Co. Donegal), Amelia Stein (Co. Mayo), Ronan McCall (Inish Oirr, Co. Galway) and Jan O’Connell (Co. Kerry).
This exhibition invited the viewer to contemplate the Atlantic Ocean as a storied place, visually engaging through the lens of four photographers.
Exhibition production team:
Cairde Sligo Arts Festival director: Tara McGowan
Photography Curator: Yvette Monahan
Installation design and production: Chan Kin
Printing: Ballast Design
Festival Website: https://www.cairdefestival.com/2023/atlantic-mythologies
The exhibition structures have been funded by County Sligo Leader Partnership and the exhibition is supported by the Rosses Point Development Association.
Transcendent Documents - 2022 Cairde Sligo Arts Festival
The American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) first referred to photographs as 'transcendent documents.' Evans believed photographs could have recognizable content, resonance, and cultural meaning and still stand for or evoke a state of mind. Photographs that stir something in the photographers – this content, in this light, means something.
Transcendent Documents featured four Irish photographers working with images using a sense of place to evoke a particular state of mind. Cairde has invited photographers who have made bodies of work in the North-West and West, including Jill Quigley (Co. Donegal), Linda Brownlee (Co. Mayo), Kenneth O'Halloran (Co. Clare), and Yvette Monahan (Co. Sligo).
Transcendent Documents invited the viewer to consider place as a subjective experience that is visually engaging through the lens of Ireland's most thought-provoking photographers.
Cairde Sligo Arts Festival director: Tara McGowan
Photography Curator: Yvette Monahan
Installation design and production: Chan Kin
Printing: Ballast Design
Festival Website: Festival Website: https://www.cairdefestival.com/2022/transcendent-documents
The exhibition structures have been funded by County Sligo Leader Partnership and the exhibition is supported by the Rosses Point Development Association.