🔸🔹🔶 UPCOMING SHOW 🔶🔹🔸
"BOUNDLESS STATES"
Custom House Gallery,
The Quay,
Westport,
Co.Mayo
Featuring Artists: Anthony D Kelly, Hina Khan & Olga Guse
Opening Reception: Thursday 17th of February 2022 6-8pm
Guest Speaker: Orlagh Heverin, Assistant Arts Officer, Mayo County Council
Running every day until Sunday 13th of March 2022
For more on the show from Visual Artists Ireland visit:
To know more about the Custom House Gallery and Studios visit: www.customhousestudios.ie
EXHIBITION - THE MAYO ARTISTS SHOW 2021 - The Linenhall Arts Centre & Ballina Arts Centre, Friday the 3rd of December 2021 – Saturday the 15th of January 2022
Opening at the amazing Linenhall Arts Centre , Castlebar, Co. Mayo from 6pm, Friday the 3rd of December 2021
Also opening at the fantastic Ballina Arts Centre, Barrett St, Ballina, Co. Mayo from 8pm, Friday the 3rd of December 2021.
Running Friday the 3rd of December 2021 – Saturday the 15th of January 2022.
Bloody hell, no rest for the wicked! I am absolutely thrilled to have work in this years Mayo Artists Show, its always great to do something invlving the local arts scene.
I'm really looking forward to seeing the talented artists of Mayo out in force tonight for the biannual Mayo Artists Show!!!
This years exhibition was selected and curated by Eamonn Maxwell and features a piece by invited artist Mayo artist Niamh O'Malley.
There is also a free return bus from Ballina to Castlebar if you'd like to attend both events!
For more from the Linnenhall weave your way on over to: www.thelinenhall.com
For more from the Ballina Arts Centre take a saunter on over to:
www.ballinaartscentre.com
MAGAZINE FEATURE- "Monumental Dreams" published in Kolaj Magazine #34
MAGAZINE FEATURE- "Monumental Dreams" published in Kolaj Magazine #34
I was truly honoured to have taken part in the amazing 'Empty Columns are a Place to Dream' project which debuted at the 53rd Birr Vintage Week and Arts Festival in August, and which has since toured to the Knoxville Museum of Art as part of the Kolaj Live festival.
I was doubly honoured to co-author 'Monumental Dreams', a report on the project with the inmitable Marta Janik (. You can find our article on this wonderful project printed within the new issue of Kolaj Magazine, pages 16-19.
A big thanks once again to Caroline Conway for all your tireless work in putting the project together, Ric Kasini Kadour for your vision, curation, and the invitation to join the project.
A great big thanks also to the people of Birr for making us feel so welcome in your town. Also a special thanks to the Fannings of the Tin Jug Studio for your warmth, hospitality and pancakes so good that I'm still dreaming of them. 😴🥞☺️
For more from Kolaj Magazine visit: http://kolajmagazine.com/content/issues/kolaj-34/
To check out more of the fabulous work of Marta Janik blast off to:
http://planetmarta.com/
To visit the project archives you can go to:
https://emptycolumns.weebly.com/
Upcoming Exhibition - Empty Columns are a Place to Dream at Kolaj Live: Knoxville, Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA - 1st - 7th of November 2021
"Empty Columns are a Place to Dream" as part of Kolaj LIVE Knoxville.
Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee,
U.S.A
November 1-7, 2021
I am absolutely thrilled to hear that the "Empty Columns are a Place to Dream" project, which took place as part of the amazing Birr Vintage Week and Arts Festival has won the County Award at the Heritage Week Heritage Council's awards yesterday.
Co-ordinated by Caroline Conway, and curated by Ric Kasini Kadour, It was a real pleasure to take part in this project and a big congratulations to everyone involved.
I'm also blown away by the incredible news that the exhibition will travel to the Knoxville Museum of Art where it will be part of Kolaj LIVE Knoxville, from November 1-7, 2021.
This project featured local and international collage artists and their interpretations of the empty column in Emmet Square which was formerly the site of a statue to the Duke of Cumberland. Infamous for his brutal oppression of a Scottish uprising. The statue itself has long since been felled, leaving an empty void.
The artists in engaging with this curious absence sparked a timely and creative debate about the role of monuments, the values we uphold, the things we choose to forget, and how this is decided.
To find out more about the tremendous Kolaj Live festival in Knoxville visit:
https://www.kolajinstitute.org/kolaj-live-knoxville.html
To visit the "Empty Columns Project Archives" and view the work you can go to: https://emptycolumns.weebly.com/
The Freeform Trouble Rare Monster Archives - The Calamitous Compendium of Year Four
😈👹👺🤖!!!!!MONSTER SEASON COMMENCES!!!!!!👾👽👻🎃
Woe betide us!
The slimy, scaly, unscrupulous claw of October has arrived once again to clasp at our wavering hearts and instill a dread so deep, so grievous, and so dark, that no light can ever hope to reach within it.
It is with the greatest of fear and trepidation that I must once more pry open the jaws of the Rare Monster Archives to reveal the ill-contents of this, The Calamitous Compendium of Year Four.
What array of monstrosities awaits us within? Who could possibly say? Who would want to? Anyone with an ounce of sense would have fled to the hills long ago. . . If you remain, I can only thank you for accompanying me on this, most perilous of journeys.
What a haul this year! We have a rich assortment amongst these findings and profiles, the materials within have been carefully obtained by our world class agents through sneakery, snakery, covert maneuvering, safe-cracking, breaking and entering, trickery, misdirection, cajolery, roguery, conspiracy and outright armed robbery. Through these skills and others our daring team have gained exclusive access to ancient ruins, undersea laboratories, classified astronomical charts, underground military bases, forbidden libraries, lunar outposts and all manner of confidential records.
The stupendous scope of our scintillating specimens is summed up by this quote from the eminent Swiss-American Biologist and Geologist Louis Agassiz:
“The possibilities of existence run so deeply into the extravagant that there is scarcely any conception too extraordinary for nature to realize.”
So brave with us if you will in the coming days and weeks as we reveal the results of this year’s intrepid investigations.
Or if you are feeling particularly courageous you can explore the riveting results from the previous three years over at the Freeform Trouble Rare Monster Archives.
Upcoming Exhibition - K-FEST Arts Festival - Killorglin, Co Kerry, Ireland - 22nd - 25th October 2021
K-FEST 2021
KILORGLIN, CO.KERRY, IRELAND
22nd - 25th October 2021
I am thrilled to announce that I will be taking part in this year’s K-FEST Arts Festival in wonderful Killorglin, Co. Kerry. The action will all be kicking off on October bank holiday weekend.
Their programme is jam packed with incredible Visual Arts, Crafts, Music, Drama, Workshops and Family Events. I can’t wait to get involved in this feast of culture and curiosity .
Check out a statement from the festival below:
“K-FEST is delighted to be back for 2021, albeit delayed to the October Bank Holiday from the usual June Bank Holiday weekend.
From October 22nd to 25th, you can expect a wide range of visual and performance art taking place in pop-up galleries dotted throughout the town.
With a focus on emerging artists, K-FEST has very much established itself as an important date on the national arts calendar, where the arts community and the local community become one community for a weekend.
You also expect the best in up-and-coming Irish bands and music acts, with genres from jazz to pop to rock to punk to electronic and DJs. K-FEST was nominated for a best small music festival in the IMRO awards just before lockdowns, so they can’t wait to get going again and curating more great Irish music.
As well as family events and workshops during the day, there is a drama-packed programme including plays, poetry, films, comedy shows and even a cabaret circus.”
Check out more from the festival at their official site here.
New Work - "A Monument To Dreaming Together" for Empty Columns are a Place to Dream @ The 53rd Annual Birr Vintage Arts Week, from the 14th-20th of August 2021
"A Monument to Dreaming Together" (2021) - Digital Collage - Anthony D Kelly
My piece in response to the “Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream" project in Birr, Co. Offaly, Ireland, as part of the Birr Vintage Week & Arts Festival.
See my statement below:
“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” - James Baldwin
To dream is to embark on a ubiquitous and mystical human experience. We each engage in nightly expeditions into the vast wildness of our own inner expanse, embarking on nocturnal journeys through the uncharted hinterlands of the self. Contact with this emergent space often churns forth inspirational ideas, creative insights and integrative experiences, possessed of a form of deep intelligence that is unfamiliar in our waking lives. Recent sleep research has even implicated dreaming as an integral element in the mind’s inherent capacity to process and heal from traumatic events.
Dreaming is also synonymous with the ability to look beyond, and to envision new and better futures, both personal and collective. Indeed the simple statement of “I have a dream…” evokes the powerful words of Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, his speech itself an act of collective dreaming that opened new pathways for discourse and lived possibilities. Also in listening to the history of Birr, there is much evidence of the town as a powerful site for collective dreaming. For example, the famous Leviathan of Parsonstown; a literal device constructed for the purpose of seeing far beyond our own world, and peering into the unknown heavens. And the Cáin Adomnáin or Law of The Innocents that came about as a result of the Synod of Birr in 697AD. This agreement was a prototype for the Geneva Convention and the first such accord to protect innocents during wartime, envisioning and enacting a better future.
Our world today is one of many crises. Humanity is struggling, as a people we are deeply troubled, fractured, isolated, grief stricken and traumatised. This is why now, possibly more than ever, we need new sites and spaces to gather, heal and relearn the ancient art of dreaming together.
All works from this outstanding project will be published in a book from Kolaj Magazine to mark the exhibition this can be preordered here.
Upcoming Exhibition - Empty Columns are a Place to Dream @ The 53rd Annual Birr Vintage Arts Week, from the 14th-20th of August 2021
Various Sites in Birr Town Centre, Birr, County Offaly,
The 53rd Annual Birr Vintage Arts Week,
From the 14th-20th of August 2021
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“Empty Columns” Panel Discussion Tuesday 17th August at 7.30pm, Birr Theatre & Arts Centre
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I am absolutely thrilled to be taking part in The Empty Columns are a Place to Dream Project as part of The 53rd Annual Birr Vintage Arts Week this August. This project curated by Ric Kasini Kadour will feature the work of 20 international collage artists, responding to an empty column which sits at the centre of Parsons Square, Birr, County Offaly. Through this project we explore monuments at large as focal points for communities, ideas and intentions; and their sometimes oppressive, often contentious, and potentially constructive roles as we move forward into the future.
Ric writes: “Monuments are a particular type of public art that plays an important role in the psyche of a community. A stitch that binds geography to history, monuments express community values. They say, ‘This is who we are. This is what we want the future to remember.’ They commemorate the dead and recall the past. But unlike headstones, monuments are communal by design, collective expressions of grief and remembrance.”
For more on the project from Ric Kasini Kadour visit here.
For more on Birr Vintage Arts Week visit here.
Magazine Feature - KOLAJ #32 - As part of Rod T. Boyer's excellent article 'Mind The Gap - Collision and Context in Haiku and Collage'
Magazine Feature - I am delighted that my piece 'A Dream for Transformation and New Growth' has been printed in this season's Issue 32 of Kolaj Magazine. This work was included as part of Rod T. Boyer's excellent article 'Mind The Gap - Collision and Context in Haiku and Collage' pg. 14 -19.
I really enjoyed reading about his proposition that disjunction as opposed to juxtaposition is the real driving force for making meaning throughout both the mediums of haiku and collage.
He eloquently posits that by leaving a disjunctive gap for our readers/viewers to intuit their own connections between elements of a composition, we allow them a fruitful space in which they become active members in creating new meaning from our work.
Intriguing stuff indeed, I certainly ended up saying "Hmmmmmmmmmm . . . Very interesting! " out loud to myself a number of times while reading this article.
To check out Rod T.Boyer's haiku & visual art visit: www.ourthomasart.com
To visit the illustrious Kolaj magazine go to: http://kolajmagazine.com/content/
Februllage 2021 - Gallery Now Open
Februllage is a yearly incitement to creativity and playfulness, hosted by the Edinburgh Collage Collective and the Scandanavian Collage Museum during the month of February. The organisers provide a daily prompt word and artists from all over the globe devise their response. This sets the stage for an annual spree of incredible collage work.
I had wonderful fun this year and really pushed my practice, becoming more confident in my skills and in my use of colour. To check out this years gallery of my Februllage work click right here.
You can also visit the amazing main Februllage Instagram Page Here.