About

Ground Up

Clare is predominantly a rural county. The majority of artists living in Clare reside in a rural setting, yet the arts, for the most part, take place in urban locations. The Arts Office of Clare County Council initiated Ground Up to foster a new type of engagement between Public Art and rural contexts.

As well as a desire to generate debate and discussion amongst practitioners and the rural ‘constituency’, Ground Up set out to fulfill a number of other objectives;

• To create opportunities for artists to make interesting, challenging artworks where they live, independent of the gallery system.

• To create opportunities for artists to inspire one another, and to interact with national/ international practitioners.
   

There were three distinct strands to the project, Ground Up 1, In Under Over Out, and Rural Vernacular. In the first two strands a team of artists, combining a range of disciplines were invited to participate in a ‘research’ or process stage, which was imagined as a way of examining received values about rural contexts and culture. The artists were asked to meet regularly, for the purpose of working collaboratively to identify the significant forces at work on rural culture and society. A number of temporary artworks in rural contexts were commissioned from each strand.

Each process had its own character with the artists electing to undertake various forms of public actions. More details on each individual research processes can be found on the relevent project pages.

The third strand had an international dimension, with arists from Russia, Hungary, Switzwerland, Ireland and England participating. Each of these artists worked with a local artist as their assistant; this relationship provided invaluable local information to selected artists and gave local artists a chance to work with internationally established artists.

A number of issues have been identified through the Ground Up research stages;

• We live essentially in a post-agricultural society - the ‘rural’ is a contested zone under enormous pressure. Art could pioneer new approaches to the tensions, creating room for discussion about innovative solutions.
  
• The ‘audience’ in rural contexts is unlikely to be made up of specialist interest groups as is often true of urban contexts, but is more likely to be an aggregate. Observers are also likely to have participated in the making or locating of the artwork or event.
  
• There are existing rural aesthetics and indigenous forms of rural creativity – artists are in a position to identify and draw attention to these.
  
• Artworks located in rural contexts should be seen as a part of a dialogue between artists and communities, but for this to work the community’s responses need to be recorded and fed back into the dialogue process.