C110 Update

From left to right: Peter Richards, Seamus Harahan, Nicholas Keogh, Richard West (Factotum), Sandra Johnston, Paddy Bloomer, Alistair Wilson, Ian Charlesworth, Mary McIntyre, Darren Murray, Stephen Hackett, Aisling O'Beirn and Blathnaid Hogg, Michael Hogg; absent from photo: William McKeown, Katrina Moorhead; courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery

Northern Ireland artists massing in Venice

For the first time, Northern Ireland is going to the Venice Biennale, probably still the international art event at which to be seen. The Curator for Northern Ireland is Hugh Mulholland, Director of Belfast's Ormeau Baths Gallery. The venture is a joint initiative of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the British Council. The Biennale opens in June 2005.

The artists in question?: Patrick Bloomer, Ian Charlesworth, Factotum, Seamus Harahan, Michael Hogg, Sandra Johnston, Nicholas Keogh, Katrina Moorhead, Darren Murray, Mary McIntyre, William McKeown, Aisling O'Beirn, Peter Richards and Alistair Wilson. If most of these names look familiar, it's because you've been diligently reading your CIRCA.

It is to be a two-pronged initiative, one lasting the duration of the Biennale, the other targeting a major symposium on contemporary art to take place in Venice in the autumn. It looks as though Mulholland has very good reason to be pleased not only with his selection of artists, but also with the chosen venue. He has secured the Institute Santa Maria della Pietà, which is along the seafront a short distance from Piazza San Marco and on the trail - and this is very important - to Giardini and the Arsenale, where the heavyweights flex their artistic and national(istic) muscles. It's also conveniently close to where the superrich park their cruisers.

The Institute Santa Maria della Pietà, Venice, venue of Northern Ireland's participation in the Venice Biennale 2005; courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery

According to Mulholland:

This is an amazing opportunity for the artists represented here to capitalise on the exposure that participation in the Biennale will offer. It will also bring Northern Ireland to the attention of international curators and critics, which I hope will have even greater long-term benefits for many more artists working here who contribute to what is an exciting and vibrant visual-arts sector here.

Republic still at the decision stage...

The Republic of Ireland, after a bit of a false start, is apparently still some way behind Northern Ireland in selecting artists for the Venice Biennale. The commissioner for the Republic is Sarah Glennie. Glennie has worked as a curator at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and also for the Henry Moore Foundation. She is co-curator of Romantic Detachment which opened recently at New York's prestigious PS1 MoMA.

New Board members at CIRCA

CIRCA is very pleased to welcome the following to its Board: Isabel Nolan, artist; Darragh Hogan, like Nolan also a graduate of the National College of Art and Design but now a Director of Dublin's Kerlin Gallery; and Mark Garry, artist and curator.

The other biennale

view of part of Stephen Loughman exhibition, São Paulo;images courtesy Oliver Dowling

Still holding firm as the other major biennale, the São Paulo Bienal opened in September. The Republic of Ireland's Commissioner for the Brazil bash - also the Republic's Commissioner for the Venice Biennale in 2003 - is Valerie Connor. The artists she chose were Stephen Loughman, Dennis McNulty and desperate optimists (Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy). You can read a review of their contribution on page ??? of this issue.

By all accounts, the undertaking has proved highly successful. Two of Loughman's paintings from the Bienal have been purchased by the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Loughman and Dennis McNulty in consultation at the Bienal; images courtesy Oliver Dowling

New Belfast gallery with eastern accent

Studio 4-11 is the name of a new gallery at 20 Botanic Avenue, Belfast. Run by Christopher Mattingly, whose background is in Art History, the gallery will promote the work of artists from the Middle East as well as from Northern Ireland. The first show there, Beirut - Belfast, features the works of Tarek Chemaly, Reine Mahfouz and Ra§fik Majzoub. Contact the gallery at +44 28 9023 1580.

Geraldine O'Neill: Finding CIRCA, 2004, oil on canvas, 76 x 102 cm; photo John Kellett; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery

Subscribe and win!

Did you notice that we have a new subscription prize at CIRCA? The winner will walk away with a stunning, CIRCA-commissioned painting by Geraldine O'Neill. You can find out more by consulting our ad in this issue or by going to www.recirca.com/subscribe. (Existing subscribers: please note that you have to answer a simple question to be in with a chance to win; please go to the above web address or consult our ad.) The delighted winner of our last subscriptions prize, an original painting by Róisín Duffy, is Annalisa Setti, a subscriber in Italy.

Artists / Ireland - can you help?

Artists / Ireland is a recirca.com database of over 2,000 artists, and growing, with links to websites that hold significant amounts of information about those artists. The criterion for being in the database is that the artist is working in Ireland, is from her, or has done a significant amount of work in here. Stage 2 is to make the database searchable by keyword. Not easy - imagine rating each of 2,000 artists on around one hundred keywords. If you have a bit of surf time you could give us, we'll let you know how you could assist us in tacking keywords onto names. Have a look at recirca.com/artists. Then e-mail us at artists2@recirca.com. Many thanks!

Tom Molloy: Map, collage; courtesy Rubicon Gallery

Prize time

• Antrim-based artist Claire Morgan has lifted the prestigious Royal British Society of Sculptors' Award in London, an award intended to recognise the best of emerging sculptural talent in the UK.

Twenty-four year old Morgan has also exhibited this year in London, Newcastle upon Tyne and at Westonbirt's Festival of the Garden and was last year awarded the Sotheby's People's Choice Prize. The artist has been commissioned by Belfast's Old Museum Arts Centre to exhibit during the early months of next year - but those of us who have issues with spiders apparently ought to be pre-warned...

• Clare-based artist Samuel Walsh was a major prizewinner at the 4th International Biennial of Drawing, Pilsen. Specifically, he took the International Association of Art - Europe Prize. The biennial, which is juried by an international panel, originated in 1996 as a Czech exhibition and developed to involve Central European countries in 1998 and finally all European countries this year.

Having long been associated with the medium of drawing, Walsh has already been the recipient of a major international prize for drawing in 2001 at the 15th International Triennial of Drawing in Rijeka, Croatia. His affinity toward drawing can also be seen in his involvement in the founding of the National Collection of Contemporary Drawing which is based in the Limerick City Gallery of Art.

Samuel Walsh: Drawing 298, 2001, charcoal and conté on paper, 84 x 102 cm; courtesy Rubicon Gallery

• Waterford Artist Tom Molloy has been awarded the 2004 Tony O'Malley Travel Award for Irish Painters. Established to honour the late painter Tony O'Malley, the award reflects the O'Malley's placing of importance in travel, both nationally and internationally, throughout his artistic career.

For the Award, each applying artist submits a proposal to the Butler Gallery, detailing their prospective plans for utilising the E2,600 prize fund. Molloy will use the award to travel to forty-eight sites in Ireland, painting a watercolour at each site in order to create a body of work dealing with principles of landscape, beauty, travel and tourism. He sees this as an opportunity to connect contemporary artists and travellers to the past, demonstrating the mediation of natural beauty through maps, tour guides and interpretative centres today. The artist, who is head of the painting department at the Burren College of Art - where he has taught for nine years - has exhibited both here and abroad over the last fifteen years. Recent exhibitions include Dead Texans and Allegiance, both at Dublin's Rubicon Gallery, by whom he is represented.

A screengrab of the new Triskel website - www.triskelart.com

Triskel's back

One of Cork's most important arts spaces, Triskel, is back in town, after being closed for refurbishment. It boasts more flexible spaces, a street café, new workspaces, and a flash new website. All spruced up, in other words, for the big event, Cork's turn as European Capital of Culture in 2005.

The British Government-funded Arts and Humanities Research Board has awarded a fellowship to artist Anne Seagrave to undertake an important study at the University of Ulster. Seagrave will be constructing a database there of the many artists who utilise self-image in their work. The artist has previously won the £5,000 UK Arts Foundation Live Art Fellowship Award, had a solo exhibition at the Guinness Storehouse Gallery in Dublin last year, and is currently working on a piece for presentation during Cork 2005 next January. Her twenty-year experience as a practicing artist will be brought on board for the extensive project, where she will be assisted by Professor Alastair MacLennan of the School of Art and Design.

Dan the man

Next year's annual ev+a exhibition in Limerick will be curated by American Dan Cameron. ev+a, which was founded in 1977, has had in the recent years several international guest curators, including this year's curator Zdenka Badovinac, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljublijana.

For ev+a 2005, Cameron will bring his experience as senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, as well as from a range of internationally curated events including last year's 8th Istanbul Biennial. Cameron was once described as having the "understated confidence of a comic-book villain about to terminate Cleveland."

Exciting Interface openings

Interface, a new research centre in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ulster, will concentrate on practice-led, interdisciplinary art and design activity, but it will also look at changes in modern technology and their impact on the field. It has already attracted £9 million in funding.

The university appointed Declan McGonagle as Director of the Centre earlier this year, following his stints at Dublin's City Arts Centre and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Derry's Orchard Gallery. The University is in the middle of a mammoth recruitment drive, the largest for any of its research centres, hoping to appoint fourteen (!) candidates for the positions of Lecturer, Research Fellow, Research Associate and Assistant Associate. According to McGonagle:

We see ourselves coming up with models of practice, using visual art and design at their best to provide a platform in often depressed areas of Northern Ireland for shared ventures based on new knowledge and new ways of doing things...Historically, the best visual arts have been about communication not just self-expression. One of the problems in Northern Ireland has been the difficulty in communicating with each other. We'll be trying to agree working practices that will facilitate dialogue between communities.

John Hunt; photo / courtesy Gerry Farrell

John Hunt's background undoubtedly had a major impact on the formation of his character. He grew up surrounded by the Hunt collection and with parents who between them had extraordinary knowledge, ranging from archaeology to twentieth-century art. It was therefore natural that he chose to study Archaeology and History of Art as his subjects in college, graduating from UCD in 1979. A chance request from the then Visual Arts Officer in the Arts Council to the History of Art Professor was to have a fundamental impact on his career. It led to working on the installation of a major exhibition of contemporary Yugoslav Art in the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny in September 1979, and ultimately to the formation of Art and Exhibition Services. This was the first professional company in Ireland devoted to the transport and installation of art exhibitions. The experience of working with artists and with introducing contemporary art to new audiences around the country, in a time when the development of arts centres and galleries was beginning, was to lead to a life-long commitment to the contemporary arts and in particular to artists in Ireland.

In 1984, John Hunt was appointed Visual Arts and Film Officer in the Arts Council. Here he continued his support for artists through contact and by continuing Council policy of organising touring and major retrospective exhibitions. He was also notable for expanding the support of the arts to embrace architecture. His interest in working directly with artists and art led him to become Director of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios in 1988. Here, his ability to bring energy, profile and vision to the arts was demonstrated by Showcase, an exhibition in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in 1989, which displayed work by the thirty-two artists working in the studios.

In October 1990, he left Temple Bar Gallery and Studios to devote his time to establishing a permanent home for the Hunt Collection in Limerick. Combining masterful strategies and hard work, he succeeded in delivering a museum of international importance. During his time working to develop the Hunt Museum, John kept in touch with contemporary arts activity. At this time he was appointed as a board member of Island Theatre Company. His contribution to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, of which he was chairman at the time of his death, was to yet again demonstrate his ability for strategic thinking and the support of artists. Most of all, he quietly supported individual artists and arts organisations thorough the purchase of artworks and through his wisdom and advice. In recognition of his achievements he was given many awards. These included the Freedom of the City of Limerick (1997), the Royal Hibernian Gold Medal (2001), and recently the award of an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Limerick.

Shortly after the opening of the Hunt Museum in 1997, John pursued an interest in communicating the value and importance of the arts to a wider public. He was visual-arts reviewer for The Arts Show and Rattlebag on RTÉ Radio One. He also wrote an arts column for the Limerick Evening Echo and was a contributing editor for CIRCA Art Magazine. As a reviewer he was always ready to highlight the positive and to place artists' endeavours in context. His latest project, begun just before he became ill, was to produce Red Top Arts (a working title), with a journalist colleague in Limerick. His intention was to provide topical and lively news about the arts to a national audience.

John Hunt is most remembered for his generosity, wisdom and love of life. This particularly included his wife Patricia, his children Jack, Paddy and Miriam, and his sister Trudy. While his family was his true focus in life, he also made time for others.

Becoming a friend of John's seemed the most natural thing in the world.

Ruairí Ó Cuív

Article reproduced from CIRCA 110, Winter 2004, pp.18–26
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