A fair slice of the cake
KILKENNY Arts Festival has a rich visual arts programme, encompassing film, performance, craft, sculpture, print, photography and painting. The events are staged in 20 venues across the city.
At the Still Point, a programme curated by Josephine Kelliher (owner and director of the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin) celebrates nine Irish female artists, practitioners in film and new media.
One of them is Aideen Barry, a Cork woman who has lived in Galway since completing her degree at the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology. Barry works in film and sculpture, and lectures in Limerick School of Art & Design.
Barry’s humorous film Possession, featured in At the Still Point, delves into the psyche of Irish women in post-boom Ireland. “Possession is actually an animation,” says Barry. “It took six and a half months to make. How animation works is that 25 different photographs are flicked in one second of animation.
“One of the extraordinary things I had to do for the shoot was to cut my back lawn with scissors in my hair and make it look like my scissors and my hair was doing the cutting.
“So I had to lie down, move the scissors, cut a bit, stand up, stand back, get the lawn mower, cut the grass, lie down again, and so on.”
The film features Barry in a frenzy of activity, expressed through fast, jumpy editing. She rushes around the house and garden, multi-tasking in her domestic chores and going ‘cuckoo’ from feeling overwhelmed.
“I had to do meticulous, and ridiculous, things to try and create the illusion that I had made for these strange characters in the film. I spent seven days baking for one of the shoots and I had to try to make it look like I had eaten this giant mass of cakes.
“Again, it was a series of illusions, it looked like the mountain of cakes was moving into my mouth and moving back out again. The entire film was shot in a group of redundant housing estates in Ireland, mostly in Galway. The whole notion behind it is: what is ‘possessed’? What is ‘possession’? ‘Possession’ is something we own, or even a haunting.
“There is a double entendre about what the word ‘possession’ actually means. The characters that live in these housing estates manifest all of the haunted people that we see every day. People that are living with debt, living with houses that aren’t worth the value of the mortgage they got out. That’s what ‘possession’ is about for me.”
This theme of attempting to catch up with herself through housework has been explored by Barry in previous projects.
A 2008 residency in the NASA space centre resulted in Barry training for three months to do an art performance in zero gravity. In a sculptural costume, she took out her hoover to set the world to rights in her film Vacuuming in a Vacuum.
“When I look out the window in the housing estate that I live in, I think every other person out there has the same compulsive pernicketiness as myself,” says Barry. “It’s this hyper pace that we live in now in contemporary Ireland. I’m very much interested in how we came from ‘Arra grand, take it easy, sit down and have a cup of tea’ to now.
“The pace of life seems to be so much faster, even now with the crash. The air is almost potent, with nervousness and nervous notions.
“One of the big questions in my work is: ‘why is it when you look out your window and you see someone hoovering outside their house, that’s a normal thing to see now’? My hovering in zero gravity was a comment on that madness, that hyper-activity we seem to live in now.”
Barry works in a broad range of media and has recently been making work in San Francisco, in a military base called Fort Barry, which houses old nuclear missiles from the Cold War.
She was also involved in the launch of an art app called ‘art connect’, which was created to keep the national art community informed of its resources, of events, and more.
In Fake Public Art Project in Killard, Co Mayo, Barry turned public art on its head and put forward some outlandish spoof submissions, to be voted on by a panel of volunteers in a performance. This was so well received it may be taken nationwide.
“For me, it is very fluid, I don’t see myself as solely a filmmaker,” says Barry. “I enjoy working with the moving image. But, every now and again, I get a pang to do something three-dimensional, like a drawing or a performance or a sculptural object.
“That’s how I satisfy my hunger in that way. Contemporary artists now are working with a multitude of media, a lot of them are working with computer media a lot. It’s quite a fluid thing at the moment, there aren’t as many artists working in one media anymore.
“All art is about looking at what makes you tick and the environment you live in, and how you reflect that back out and make that work relate to the people who are going to come in and see your show.”
* Possession runs as part of At the Still Point in the Victorian Tea House, Bateman’s Square, Kilkenny, 10am – 6pm, Aug 11 – 19.
Brunch with the artists, Cleere’s pub. 10.30am Saturday, August 11.
‘Redress’, live performance by Áine Phillips at the Bishop’s Robing Room, The Heritage Council. 12pm to 4pm Saturday, August 11.
At the Still Point, Irish women artists working in film, various venues. Featuring: Aideen Barry, Cecily Brennan, Anita Groener, Tracy Hanna, Jesse Jones, Niamh O’Malley, Áine Phillips & Vivienne Dick, Deborah Smith. August 11 – 19
‘Plunge’ by Robert Dunne at The Watergate Theatre until September 14.
Bridget Flannery at Berkley Gallery.August 10 — 19.
Paddy Tynan at Berkley Gallery.August 10 — 19.
‘The River’ by Bernadette Kiely at Mount Juliet, Thomastown.August 10 — 19.
‘Electron Cloud’ by Lucy McKenna at St. Mary’s Lane. August 10 — 19.
‘MADE by Hand’ part of ‘MADE in Kilkenny’ series at Butler House.August 10 — 19.
‘Core’ at Shankill Castle August 10 — 17.
‘Reaching for the Sun’ by Jason Turner at The Arcade, High Street.August 11 — 18.
Fine Art Printmakers members’ exhibition at Blackstack Studio.August 11 — 19.
Patrick O’Connor at the Kilkenny County Arts Office August 11 — 31.
Hans Op de Beek at the Butler GalleryAugust11 — October 14
‘Tributes’, 5 to 6 Women’s Art Project at The Watergarden, Ladywell Street, Thomastown until August 24
Utensil, current approaches to tableware, National Craft Gallery. August 11 – October 29, closed Mondays except on bank holidays.
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