Shifting Ground - Art in Rural Context

Speakers, Participating Artists and Curators

• TransLocal  www.translocal.org ; Maja Fowkes and Dr. Reuben Fowkes are art historians and curators; they have dealt with issues of art and sustainability through exhibitions, such as ‘Human/Nature’ in 2002 and ‘Unframed Landscapes’ in 2004, in their collaborative writings, including ‘The Art of Making Do with Enough’ in The New Art (Rachmaninoff’s London, 2006) and ‘The Principles of Sustainability in Contemporary Art’ (Praesens / www.greenmuseum.org ), and as organisers of the ‘International Symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art’ at Central European University Budapest in March 2006. Many of their projects involve translocal exchange between Hungary, Croatia and UK. They are currently working on the exhibition ‘Revolution is not a Garden Party’, which deals with the contemporary resonances of revolution and opens in Trafo Gallery Budapest in October 2006. Their collaborative practice in the fields of curating, research and writing aims to create translocal knowledge and experience. www.translocal.org
  
• Fidelma Mullane is a Cultural Geographer. An expert on vernacular architecture, she will shortly publish a book on Vernacular Architecture in rural Clare.
  
• Djeribi and Dominic Stevens Djeribi is an artist, farmer and baker; she founded the Publishing Company Mermaid Turbulence and has edited a number of publications. Stevens divides his time between architecture and farming. In order to record ideas as well as buildings, he makes books. The first, Domestic, was published in 1999; the second Rural is due in 2007.
  
• Ground Up Artists Collective www.shiftingground.net ; A co-operative, artist-led society, the purpose of which is to contribute to the development of Public Art in rural contexts through curatorial and educational projects that engage directly with communities and through the publication and dissemination of relevant material. Artist members of the collective are; Maria Finucane, Maria Kerin, Aileen Lambert, John Langan, Fiona O’ Dwyer, Deirdre O’ Mahony, Áine Phillips, Sean Taylor, Vincent Wall, Fiona Woods
  
• Adam Sutherland www.grizedale.org is Director of Grizedale Arts, UK, a commissioning and residency agency based in Grizedale Forest in the Lake District of Great Britain which supports artists in making new works that relate to the context of the area. He was previously Director of art.tm a Scottish visual arts organisation. He is currently involved in the redevelopment of the artist’s residence and the Grizedale Centre. “I am particularly interested in the relationship between the urban and the rural, a subject that is especially relevant in the Lakes”.
  
• Fernando Garcia Dory is an artist and activist whose work engages specifically with issues affecting rural communities and contexts. As well as engaging directly with issues affecting rural communities in Spain, Garcia Dory facilitates projects, such as working with shepherds who are trying to preserve their rights and way of life in the face of EU and tourist industry pressures; seed saver projects working to counteract GM Terminator Technology; food security projects in Spain, India and Latin America and free software access for communities. He works in Asturias, Northern Spain with Plataforma Rural, an alliance of stakeholders including farmers unions, consumers’ associations, development NGOs and environmental organizations
  
• Kristina Leko www.creamandcheese.org 
  Lives and works between New York, Berlin and Zagreb. Has shown her work at Neue Galerie, Graz and Moderna Museet, Sockholm. One of her best-known works is the collaborative, interdisciplinary project Cream and Cheese, which she initiated with the aim of protecting the livelihood and products of the Zagreb milkmaids.
  
• Dr. Mark Haywood www.clear.ac.uk is an artist, writer and researcher at the Centre for Landscape and Environmental Art Research [CLEAR] at the Cumbria Institute of the Arts, UK.  His research interests include contextual practice and writing on art, design and contemporary / historical aspects of visual culture, particularly the construction of aesthetic values; contemporary landscape theory: the tourist's gaze, the sublimity of driving, aspects of 'non-place'
  
• Suzanne Lacy is an Internationally known conceptual/performance artist whose work includes
  large scale performances on social themes and urban issues. Since 1970, her work has addressed a broad range of social and political themes. Her artworks take the form of installations, social process, writing, photography, and performance, and are often expansive collaborations with large numbers of individuals. Most of her major works are documented by video or television and include media literacy and analysis.
  
  Lacy is a proponent through art and writing for activism, audience engagement, and artists' roles in
  shaping the public agenda. Lacy has published articles on public theory in Performing Art Journal, Ms. Magazine, Art Journal, High Performance, and the Public Art Review, among others. She has exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art in London, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, and the New Museum in New York, and her work has been reviewed in Artforum, The Drama Review, Art in America, High Performance, the L.A. Times, Village Voice, and numerous books. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Arts International, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, the Surdna Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her book on new genre public art, Mapping the Terrain (1995), is published by Bay Press.
  
  Lacy is the Chair of Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and is currently developing an MFA in Public Practices
  
  
• Simon Sheikh
  Art critic and curator based in Berlin and Copenhagen. Editor of OE critical readers series, published by b_books Berlin. Founding member of the tv-tv initiative in Copenhagen. Assistant Professor of Art Theory and coordinator of the Critical Studies Programme at Malmö Art Academy, Sweden. Guest curator at NIFCA, Helsinki, Finland. Curatorial work includes, Do-It-Yourself! Mappings and Instructions, Bricks + Kicks, Vienna, 1997, In My Room, Musee de l'art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1998, Models of Resistance, Overgaden, Copenhagen, 2000, Naust, Øygården, Bergen, 2001, Circa Berlin, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen, 2005 and Capital (It Fails Us Now), UKS, Oslo and Kunstihoone Tallinn, 2005/6.
  

Rural Verncular - Participating Artists

• Vladimir Arkhipov www.folkforms.ru was born in Ryazan, Russia in 1967. He is a self-taught artist who trained in technical and medical fields and worked as an engineer, a doctor and in the construction business before he began exhibiting as a visual artist in 1990. Since then he has held solo shows and participated in numerous group exhibitions in Russia, the Czech Republic, the UK, Belgium, Germany, Lithuania and Australia. He is currently based in Moscow.
  
• Amanda Dunsmore is a visual artist based in Ireland. Her work explores concepts linked to social & historical issues using; installation, photography, sound and video. Currently she is working on the Keeper and Plan Projects. Plan consists of 900 enamel street signs from Weimar, Germany. and was recently exhibited at the Motorenhalle Gallery in Dresden, Germany. The first exhibition from the The Keeper Exhibition Series took place at the Triskel Gallery for Cork 2005 European City of Culture. Future exhibitions will take place at The Void Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland. The Musée international de la Croix-Rouge, in Switzerland.The Holden Gallery in Manchester, England. Amanda is a lecturer in Sculpture & Combined Media, at the Limerick School Art & Design, LIT.
  
• Patricia Hurl was born in Dublin and has exhibited widely in solo and group shows in Ireland, Spain, South Africa and the U.S.A.  She has won many awards, including the G.P.A award for Emerging Artists and the Irish Life Awards for Visual Art. She lectures in Fine Art in the DIT and is currently engaged in developing a programme of community links within the School of Art and Design, DIT.
  
• Tamás Kaszás lives and works in Budapest and Dunaujvaros, Hungary. Much of his recent work has dealt with the issue of squatting as social and political protest, and has involved creative collaborations between artists and activists. He has exhibited widely across Europe.
  
• Therry Rudin was born in Basel, Switzerland and has lived in Germany and Brazil. She attended the Basler Kunst Gewerbeschule and did her M.A. in the Kunst–Akademie in  Munich. She has exhibited widely in solo and group shows in Ireland, Switzerland and Brazil. She first came to Ireland in 1985 and lived in Limerick for five years where she founded the art school ‘Studio 55’ and published the arts magazine ‘Anima’. She now lives and works in Dublin and Barcelona. She is a lecturer in Painting in Dun Laoghaire School of Art and Design and is currently undertaking a MPhil on ‘A Comparative Analysis of Drawing’ in the Faculty of Applied Arts, DIT.