Offbeat locations: from Blackpool to Sherkin Island

Hungry Tea is just one of the exciting arts projects under way in unusual venues around Cork, writes Tina O’Sullivan

APART from the major productions at Cork Midsummer Festival — shows such as Pagliacci at the Everyman and The Sinking of the Titanic at City Hall — there is a wealth of more intimate projects getting underway this week and next.

One such is Hungry Tea, which runs at 22 Watercourse Road in Blackpool from next Tuesday. The project is a collaboration between Birmingham artist Mark Storor and Creative Connections, a group of local and immigrant women led by Áine Crowley, who brought Home Is Where the Art Is to last year’s festival.

Hungry Tea has transformed 22 Watercourse Rd from a state of dilapidation by creating an art installation within the building. This setting will host a number of theatre performances. Organisers say Storor has developed a format with the group of about 18 women where, in an instinctive way, each has found an individual performance style; whether it be interacting with the audience or acting in a more traditional sense.

The Midsummer Festival also has a healthy visual art programme this year. Sound Art is heavily represented, with The Memory Room by Danny McCarthy in The Guesthouse, Strange Attractor in the Crawford Art Gallery, and Drift by Mark Garry on Sherkin Island.

The library in Crawford Art Gallery is a new exhibition venue, where Stephen McGlynn and Anna Crudge are curating The Reading Room. The show has been conceived to respond to this special space. “I was interested in positioning a show within the context of documentation or archives,” says McGlynn. “This being an archival space, it offered a dual positioning of the contemporary versus the classic and allowed for a space the work could grow in.”

McGlynn and Crudge asked four young artists working in Cork city to make new work for the project: Tom Dalton, Richard Forrest, Áine Saunders and David Upton. “I was aware of each of the four artists’ work from last year’s Crawford Degree Show,” says McGlynn. “Then, across the year, I got to know them independently. They were all people who I felt were doing something very interesting right now. None of the works were selected to be in this space; each of the artists were invited to make site visits and to instigate a dialogue with myself and Anna Crudge. The works were generated with the space in mind.”

The resulting artwork ranges in media from film to found objects. The artists were encouraged to push the boundaries of their practice and take inspiration from the library.

“I think each had a very independent approach,” says McGlynn. “They were dealing with different languages and creating landscape or engaging with ideas like the inclusion or removal of the artist or the presentation of these monumental works.

“Each had the opportunity to experiment outside of their practice to this point and it pushed them a little bit as far as the construction of new media.”

Over in Triskel Christchurch, Paul Gregg was invited to present a studio style retrospective called Inductive Probability. No mean feat for a man who works mainly in permanent public commissions. What looks like an inventor’s lab gives an insight into the mindset of the artist through the models and plans he has made over the years.

“I have very few pieces at my disposal that have survived,” says Gregg. “Most of them have been created for a specific show and then either sold or disassembled or recycled into something else. Or they’re in permanently installed situations like the One Revolution Per Day piece in Switzerland.

“The show is early work, where people can see interesting ideas laid out in a very simple fashion. Then, since my career has advanced and progressed, I’ve had more resources and you’ll see more elaborate work and how the thinking blossoms, hopefully with more resources and expertise.”

One of Gregg’s commissions, Subaquatic Dublin, is in the Children’s Hospital, Dublin. Here he constructed a miniature Dublin City within a fish tank. A more controversial piece was a parachute drop in Waterford City called Parachute Mystery. Army explosive experts were called to investigate the objects, orange and white parachutes containing test-tubes, found around Waterford by the public, before it was announced they were in fact art.

Models of Dublin’s Liberty Hall and a parachute are among the many intriguing objects in the show at Triskel. There is also a detailed booklet explaining how these models led to Gregg’s final art-projects and installations.

* Hungry Tea will run from Jun 26-30, free admission but limited capacity.

Paul Gregg will talk about his work in Triskel Christchurch at 1pm on Jun 25. Viewing of The Reading Room by appointment, noon-2pm daily (not Sundays).

Cork Midsummer Festival runs until Jul1.

www.corkmidsummerfestival.com