Cow House Studios Autumn Residency, 2017

With the generous support of Wexford County Council & The National College of Art & Design, Cow House Studios presents Rising from the Hill: Local Systems in Global Contexts, a 6-week residency that will explore and develop methods of giving aesthetic forms to real-life, situations. In particular, participants will respond to the local environment of Cow House Studios, in the rural Irish countryside of Wexford. Participants will be encouraged to use ideas, strategies, and metaphors of “systems” to consider the complex relationships between this local context and larger global systems such as economics, telecommunications, meteorology and so on.

This residency was conceived in the spirit of meaningful exchange between practice and theory and as an outcome of on-going collaborative projects between Francis Halsall and Kelley O’Brien investigating social relations through the lens of systems. This means to uncouple systems from individual humans and think of them, instead, as complex interactions of people, architecture, things, communications, and environments. In other words, individuals are not separate from their environments, but rather, an integral part of them.