Valuing Artistic Legacy
JOANNE LAWS REPORTS ON IVARO’S ARTISTS’ ESTATES CONFERENCE, NOVEMBER 2017.
The Permeable Institution – A Response to Andrew Kearney’s ‘Mechanism’
“Power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to an ability to hide its own mechanisms.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction[i]
Joanne Laws – Speculations on a Raft
“She referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on events taking place”
– JG Ballard High Rise (1975)
Preserving Fragments
“I confess that, in order to envisage the Ireland of my best years, I throw my mind back for half a century. There were many “disadvantages” – few bicycles, no motor-cars on the roads, no domestic electricity, no tarmac, no jazz (or worse), but there was less rush, time to think about things, and time to hold communion with nature, which is much the same as communion with God.”
Robert Lloyd Praeger, Irish Landscape: Cnéithe na hEireann, (1953) [i]
Biographical Landscapes
JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS ELIZABETH MAGILL ABOUT HER PAINTING PRACTICE.
JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS THREE ARTISTS AT VARIOUS STAGES OF THEIR CAREERS ABOUT MAINTAINING A PAINTING PRACTICE IN IRELAND.
Women Artists at Venice
The 57th Venice Biennale, curated by Christine Macel, proclaims an emphasis on “art and artists, positivity and reinvention”, in contrast to curator Okwui Enwezor’s overtly political stance in 2015. Probing the ritualistic aspects of art-making, Macel’s ‘Viva Arte Viva’ manifests a widespread preoccupation with craft and its traditions – an almost anthropological inquiry that occasionally borders on self-conscious ‘primitivism’.
Geometric Choreography
The current exhibtion at The Dock is ‘The Last Wilderness’ by Galway-based Swedish artist, Cecilia Danell. The exhibition was produced in collaboration with the Galway Arts Centre, where a different configuration of these works was previously presented from March to April 2017. This iteration at The Dock showcases fewer artworks and there is a greater emphasis on theatrical presentation devices, in keeping with Danell’s subject matter and ontological inquiry. This approach is also subtly site-responsive, referencing the theatre space housed on the ground floor, which invariably attracts a different audience from the gallery visitors who ascend the stairs. Playing with the staircase as a metaphor for connecting these two institutional realms, the kickboards have been painted in a soft purple hue, in a spirited gesture that also echoes the name of Danell’s music band: ‘A Lilac Decline’.
Notes from the Surface: Chaos Suspended
“For him, to get one’s bearings on the world meant to conceive all its contents as simultaneous, and to guess at their interrelationships in the cross-section of a single moment.”
― Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929)
Joanne Laws 