Wexford Arts Centre
Saturday 27th August at 3pm
The exhibition I like to eat with my hands is the outcome of our 2015 Autumn Residency residency involving five contemporary, international artists. The participants were artists Taro Furukata, Ann Maria Healy, dancer/choreographer Claire Huber and writer/artist duo KVM – Ju Hyun Lee and Ludovic Burel.
For a period of eight-weeks in autumn last year, they re-located their practices to our deeply rural environment at Cow House Studios. Together, they immersed themselves in research between the studios, the land and the shared accommodation, to create new work, share skills, and reflect on their own and others’ individual practices. Within this activity, the question was asked: can situating oneself within these new ‘Pig Earth’ surroundings potentially radicalise an existing working process?
Their answer comes to you in the form of this exhibition. It comes in the lonesomeness of Taro Furukata’s poignant attempts to assimilate (physically metabolising new spaces in the sanctity of his actual body) and to reach back home (phoning his Grandma for hand-me-down recipes); in Claire Huber’s struggle out of the physical and metaphysical confines of the body (dancing with and in nature in a wild and comic reach for meaning); in Ann Maria Healy’s search for spiritual guidance or resonance amongst dated mythological traditions (removed and ritualised in their almost but not quite kitsch physical form), and in KVM’s more than skin-deep transference of cultural mores (echoes of nasty cultural realities, warts and all).
RGKSKSRG is the paired curatorial practice of Rachael Gilbourne and Kate Strain.
Image: Ann Maria Healy, Beating to be real, 2016, HD video still.
