South Tipp Arts Podcast

Welcome to the latest episode of the South Tipp Arts Podcast!
This time I sit down with artist Moran Been-noon to chat about her exhibition 'Here Nor There' which is currently running in the gallery here at STAC until December 2nd. 'Here Nor There' invites us to consider the connection between ethnicity and one's ability to belong.

Mixing moving image and audio pieces with objects that symbolise fragments of the artist's ethnic identity, the artwork encourages us to perceive ethnicity as a multi-layered and intricate theme, and within this, consider the complexities of contemporary Irish identity.

As part of the project, Moran is running a series of FREE drop-in art lab sessions at STAC Chapel on the plaza, from 16th - 18th November (2:30 to 5:00pm) where participants can explore Moran's working process and make a piece of their own to take home - all materials provided.

If you'd like to learn more about the exhibition visit: https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/moran-been-noon
Or the workshops at STAC Chapel:
https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/here-nor-there-art-labs-with-artist-moran-been-noon

If you'd like to take a virtual tour of the exhibition: https://tinyurl.com/yc4rt5ev

Get in touch: [email protected]

In this latest Ep, I chat with artist Kate O'Shea from Broken Fields, a multi-disciplinary collective made up of individual practitioners Louise Harrington, Enya Moore, Aideen O’ Donovan and Kate O’ Shea.

Broken Fields brings together experience, knowledge, and practice from the fields of socially engaged art, architecture, community work, activism, research, and writing. The name Broken Fields refers to the breaking down of disciplines, siloes, and fields. In the breaking down of these constructed boundaries, Broken Fields brings together the strengths of diverse practices in processes, projects and spaces that are deeply place-based.

In partnership with Clonmel Junction Arts Festival, Broken Fields 'Art, What is it good for?' is a social space guided by the question: ‘How can we co-create a space with the public in Clonmel?’ Festival Activities included collective canopy making, printmaking and conversations with a series of invited artists, printmakers, community workers, architects, writers, musicians, and activists, culminating in a very busy day at STAC on Saturday 8th July!

The exhibition continues until August 5th, and features a working space where visitors can add a piece to the collective art wall, browse the large Broken Fields archive, or just take a break from the world outside. Gallery open Tuesday - Saturday from 10am-5pm.

Visit https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/broken-fields-art-what-is-it-good-for
to learn more about the artists involved in this project.

'The Ballad of Clonmel' by Padraig Stevens & Siobhán Kavanagh was composed especially for Broken Fields in response to the work. (lyrics & music copyright Padraig Stevens and Siobhán Kavanagh, 2023, Clonmel, South Tipperary Arts Centre)

If you'd like to get in touch the email address is [email protected]

In this episoed, I chat with Dorje de Burgh about his exhibition 'Under the Same Sky', currently on show at STAC.. Following the artist's move to Carrick-on-Suir in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic due to his high-risk status, Under the Same Sky is a photographic documentation of the town and its surrounds. Representing an outsiders view, this work reflects the particular atmosphere of unease and alienation of that time, as well as being an observation on community, home and belonging. Dorje also strives to subvert familiar representations of the Irish landscape, and in doing so reflect the tensions inherent in both the urban-rural space and the artist’s own conflicting positions around closeness and distance.


Dorje de Burgh lives and works between Killarney, Dublin & Berlin. Following nomination as a member of the FUTURES European mentorship program, Dorje received the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation award 2020 and The Darkroom moving image residency 2020/21, producing his second solo exhibition How To Kill Something That Doesn’t Exist in association with PhotoIreland Festival 2021.

Dorje de Burgh Website
Find Dorje on Instagram @dum_studio

Get in touch with the podcast: [email protected]

Learn more by visiting our website: www.southtippartscentre.ie

Austin McQuinn ‘Some signs are secret, some manifest’ 31st March – 13th May 2023

A Solo Exhibition of new paintings, sculpture, and live art performance, curated by Helena Tobin.

‘Some signs are secret, some manifest’ is an exhibition of new work specifically created for the double-height atrium and gallery @STAC. Austin’s new paintings on ash wood panels and found antique prints are intensely gesso-ed, collaged and inked to psychedelic effect. The 17 foot ‘Tower’ of discarded Aran sweaters in the Atrium signals the unique Norman architecture of tower houses in South Tipperary, and echoes an earlier installation McQuinn created in Kilmainham Gaol, presenting sweaters as totems to make a new tribal or fetish power-object for the Gallery.

https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/austin-mcquinn-some-signs-are-secret-some-manifest

In a challenging exploration of the traditional and the discarded, of biopower and queer energy, McQuinn will be artist-in-residence at the STAC Chapel in the former Kickham Army Barracks. He will create a twenty-four hour live-streamed live-art performance event, titled ‘Imperial Lunatic’. Following the cycle of the new moon rising, ‘Imperial Lunatic’ will incorporate the artists’ body in series of repeating actions, video clips of volcanoes and processions, percussion, medals, zigzags, tongues and talc.

https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/austin-mcquinn-imperial-lunatic

Get in touch with the podcast: [email protected]

Don't forget to like & subscribe ;)

If you missed our latest artist talk, you can listen back here.

Ita Freeney's artist talk on Saturday March 4th featured a conversation between Ita and fellow artist Katherine Boucher Beug. The discussion focused on the process behind Ita’s current series of paintings - from her choice of subject, to her focus on form, light, mood, and structure, and the making of the paintings.

Water's Edge @STAC
February 17th - March 18th 2023

Ita Freeney’s Water’s Edge exhibition consists of a series of new paintings created over the last three years. The sea is glimpsed at in all of these works but they are not seascapes per se.Their focus is on the shape of headlands, piers, slipways, strips of water, roofs - areas forming a boundary with the water or breaking the block of water or sky. The solidity of land and the surrounding infrastructure is contrasted with and used to emphasise the airiness and openness of sea and sky. This series gravitates towards horizontals, distance, direction, echoes, gaps, openings, and connections/separations.These paintings play with abstraction and representation - finding and emphasising abstract forms in reality, while also observing nuances of colour, tone and form to evoke mood and atmosphere. Familiarity and building relationships with the places that inspire, has become a very important element in the work. Many return visits to inspirations in North Mayo, and East Cork into Waterford, result in getting absorbed in the places, observing them from different vantage points and in different lights.

See more of Water's Edge, take the virtual tour, or listen back to our podcast with Ita here:
https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/ita-freeney-waters-edge

Artist Ita Freeney's 'Water's Edge' was officially opened here at STAC on 16th February by Catherine Marshall. It presents a body of ethereally beautiful paintings produced over the last three years.
The sea is glimpsed at in all of these works but they are not seascapes per se. They play with abstraction and representation - finding and emphasising abstract forms in reality, while also observing nuances of colour, tone and form to evoke mood and atmosphere. It was a pleasure to sit down with Ita for a chat about her inspirations and her practice here at STAC on the morning after the opening reception.

Water's Edge runs until March 18th - gallery open 10am to 5pm, Tuesday to Saturday.
https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/ita-freeney

Dublin born, Ita Freeney graduated from Crawford College of Art and Design with a BA Hons degree in Fine Art (1994). She now lives in Cork. Her most recent shows have included a solo exhibition - Outer Edges at The Lavit Gallery (2019) and a two person exhibition, The Paul Kane Gallery at the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin (2018). She has exhibited with the Paul Kane Gallery since 1998, with solo shows there in 2001 and 2008 as well as several two person and many group shows.

Our first exhibition of 2023 features a new body of work from Annie Hogg, coming as a result of her Tipperary Artist Residency Award with STAC, supported by Tipperary Arts Office. LOST is a keen consideration of what happens in a landscape after the land has gone through conversion to an industrial scale farming model, specifically a system of long established hedgerows.

Through installation, incorporating pigments rendered from that landscape, soundscape devised on site and sculptural elements, the work asks the questions of what cost, other than financial has this action had. The artist has used materials which were charred, ground and collected from this space in its present state to transform or at the very least confront the human grief and meaningfully mark that once, this place was alive.

Annie joined me for a chat about LOST, the specific site that it is based upon, and the deep meaning it holds for her, as well as the wider issues such as the continued industrialisation of agriculture and the need for more sustainable practices.

LOST opened on January 14th and runs until February 11th @STAC
The gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday from 10am to 5pm
https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/annie-hogg-lost

Artist Talk - Annie Hogg in conversation with Helena Tobin
Saturday 28th January @2pm
https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/artist-talk-annie-hogg-in-conversation-with-helena-tobin

Details of Annie's next scheduled workshops with Plants & Colour can be found here
https://plantsandcolour.co.uk

Check out some more of Annie's work here
https://www.instagram.com/anniehogg_thewildhedgeinkco/

Welcome to the latest episode of the South Tipp Arts Podcast!
In this Ep, we focus on the artists involved in 'She'll Give You All she Has' - Orla Barry, Chloe McKeown & Laura Fitzgerald.

In 'She'll Give You All She Has', the artists create work addressing farming, feminism, farming practices and being an artist in rural Ireland, through a mixture of objects, sound, print, writing and video. The works are woven through with absurdity, tragedy, humour and the kind of emotional detachment familiar to readers of contemporary farming manuals.

The exhibition, curated by Helena Tobin & Anne Mullee, opened on 29th October and continues at STAC until December 3rd.

All the work discussed can be explored on our website www.southtippartscentre.ie where you can even take a virtual tour of the space. Thanks to Orla, Chloe & Laura for their time, and thank you for listening :)

If you'd like to get in touch the email address is [email protected] and we always love to hear from you.

In this episode I chat to artist Stephen Brandes about his latest exhibition 'The Trotskys in Kilsheelan and Other Histories of Unreliable Origin', showing here at STAc until October 15th.
If you've not had a chance to visit, pop in and see it before it closes.

In the Winter of 1936, exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalya Sedova were taken from their house arrest at a farm outside Oslo in Norway and put on an oil tanker, destined for a new life in Mexico. In order to avoid the seasonally devastating storms attacking the Eastern Atlantic, the ship clandestinely docks in Cobh and the exiles are brought ashore. There begins a road trip that takes them to Kilsheelan and along the way to a very uncharacteristic obsession.

At this exhibition at South Tipperary Arts Centre, Brandes will present a series of recent paintings and drawings, as well as a newly commissioned video work, which collages Brandes’ own fabricated photographic images with vintage British Pathé news reels. What will be revealed is a little known moment in modern Irish history… and some of it is possibly true.

The work of Stephen Brandes is rooted in collage and is often imbued with a keen interest in modern history from the 1700’s Enlightenment to the present. Brandes interprets ‘collage’ loosely however, as an act of cutting and pasting together ideas as much as material, to produce paintings, video and drawings, as well as collage in the true sense of the art form. It could be said that even history is used as material for collage insofar that his research and observations are metaphorically cut up and reassembled to produce episodes of stories that wander sideways from established accuracy.

Get in touch!
[email protected]

Thanks for listening :0

Ed Devane is a sound artist and instrument designer based in Donegal. Beginning his creative career as an electronic music producer, his work has broadened over the years to include interactive installation, electronic instrument design, community projects and workshop facilitation relating to music and sound. Much of the inspiration behind his installation work is to use technology and instrument building to encourage creative encounters and collaborations between participants. Ed has recently produced installations for Science Gallery Dublin, The Ark, Galway City of Culture 2020, Big Bang! Festival and Science Foundation Ireland, and most recently here at STAC during the recentJunction Arts Festival.

His most recent work 'Presence' is now on display here in the gallery at STAC, and it consists of 3 interactive sound sculptures that respond to the movements of the viewer around the space.

In this episode, I caught up with Ed via Zoom to chat about what life is like for an artist making work in the wilds of West Donegal, his interest in making electronic music and how his work has developed over time to include programmable sound sculptures.

Presence continues at South Tipperary Arts Centre until August 20th, and the gallery is open from 10am to 5pm Monday to Saturday.

If you'd like to get in touch with the podcast, the email address is [email protected].

You can visit our website www.southtippartscentre.ie to find our what's on, or to sign up to our monthly newsletter.

Thanks for listening!