Blackbird Cultur-Lab, an experimental culture-farm set in Wexford, will host a free event on Saturday, April 9th, from 11 am to 1 pm. Everyone is welcome. Address: Blackbird Cultur-Lab, Haresmead, Foulkesmills, Co. Wexford. Y35XW93 Visiting International and Irish artists Karl Logge, Sara Lundy, Lar O’Toole, Marta Romani, and Anne Vetter have been taking part in […]
Community update with Mathilde Ganancia We first met Mathilde Ganancia in 2014 as one of five artists for our autumn residency that year. Since then, Mathilde has returned several times for both shorter residencies and to teach during our summer art program Art on the Farm. It is a genuine pleasure anytime she returns, most […]
Supported Summer Residency: Week 4 This is the final update from our Supported Summer Residency. In addition to the four wonderful artists, we hosted at Cow House, Co-Directors Rosie O’Gorman and Frank Abruzzese traveled to photographer Miriam O’Connor’s family farm, where she has been developing her artistic practice alongside her daily responsibilities caring for her […]
Supported Summer Residency: Week 3 This is the third update from our Supported Summer Residency. For all of us at Cow House, it has been a tremendous experience thus far. One aspect that has been particularly enjoyable for us is the opportunity to become more well acquainted with many artists we’ve admired from afar for […]
Supported Summer Residency: Week 2 This is the second update from our Supported Summer Residency. Each week we are highlighting the artworks being donated by each participating artist. This post highlights the artists and their works from week 2. Colin Martin ‘Dog (Motion Capture)’ depicts a dog in motion capture suit that is commonly used in […]
Supported Summer Residency: Week 1 We are in the midst of running our Supported Summer Residency and the time seems to be flying by. A crucial aspect of this residency has been the mutual support from both our generous donors and the artists participating in the program. We would like to share the wonderful artworks […]
Community update with Maria Hinds Maria Hinds is one of our dearest friends. She was instrumental in the early development of the design language for Cow House and has provided almost all of our print and web design since the beginning. She was also one of our first residency artists back in 2008, and her […]
Community update with Sarah Pannell Sarah Pannell was a participant in our 2018 residency How to Flatten a Mountain. She is an Australian visual artist whose work concerns culture, landscape, tradition, and community. Sarah received a BA in International Studies from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia in 2009 and a BA in Photography, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia […]
Community update with Ruth Connolly
Ruth Connolly is a photographer living and working in Dublin. She holds a BA in Fine Art Printmaking from Limerick School of Art and Design, and an MA in Photography from Central Saint Martins, London. Her first book, If you lived here, you’d be home by now was published in 2017 by The Velvet Cell.
Her personal work primarily explores the balance and tension between people and place. Commercially, she works with design studios, advertising agencies and businesses, helping to create a tone and feel for a brand through photography. Ruth is a photography lecturer at Dublin Institute of Design.
Ruth participated in our residency How to Flatten a Mountain in 2017 when she made the fantastic body of work Each evening we see the sun set which she made into an exquisite handmade book for the exhibition at Rathfarnham Castle. This work was then published by PhotoIreland Foundation as part of their TLP Editions series. Ruth has kindly taken some time to answer our questions.
Sarah Lincoln (born in 1980) is a visual artist based in Ardmore, Co. Waterford. She graduated from NCAD in 2004 with a joint degree in Fine Art and the History of Art. She holds an MA in Visual Arts Practice from IADT. Sarah writes for Enclave Review and Critique.
Her work has been included in Claremorris Open, EVA and as part of numerous group exhibitions. The Irish Arts Council, Create and ArtLinks have supported her practice.
Ruby Wallis is an artist and lecturer who completed her PhD at The National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2015. She was an artist in residence at The Irish Museum of Modern Art (2016) and received an Arts Council’s Bursary Award (2017). She was awarded the first prize at Claremorris Open Exhibition and was nominated for the Prix Pictet Photography (2013). She lectures at The Burren College of Art and the National University of Ireland.
Linda Quinlan is a graduate of the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, NCAD, Dublin and Crawford College, Cork.
She has exhibited at Oakville Galleries, Toronto; Bloomberg Space, London; CRAC Alsace, Altkirch; Smart Project Space, Amsterdam; IMMA, Dublin; Loop Gallery, Seoul; Salon Populaire, Berlin; Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Crawford Gallery, Cork; RHA, Dublin; Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin and Glucksman Gallery, Cork. Residencies include The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; Picture This, Bristol; IMMA, Dublin, TBG&S, Dublin, University of Tasmania, Hobart and Fondazione Ratti, Como.
Ruth E Lyons is based in Co. Offaly, Ireland. Over the past years, she has created works in the sky (Sky is the Limit, 2012, public commission for Scoil Naomh Eoin, Co. Meath), the sea (Pinking on Sea, 2014, Kinsale Arts Festival) and underground (Salarium 230million BCE – 2023 CE commission with EUSalt Assoc.)
Ciara McMahon is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes site-specific performative installations, paint, and video. McMahon has an MA from the combined pathway ACW program (thesis First) NCAD and a BA (First) from NCAD. She is currently enrolled in the Turps Banana Correspondance Course 2018- 2019.
McMahon’s has had solo exhibitions in The Banff Center; NCAD Gallery; the Joinery. Further shows include the Garter Lane Arts Center; Bath Royal Science and Literacy Institution; Birkbeck College, London; Pallas Projects; Annual RUA Exhibition and TULCA amongst others. McMahon has been awarded Audrey E. Klinck scholarship at the Banff Arts Centre; Artist in the Community Award Phase 1 and 2 from CREATE; Arts Council Travel and Training Award and DLR arts grants.
Sally O’Dowd is a visual artist with a socially engaged practice focusing on drawing and performance. As a politically aware artist, her research is concerned with identity and in particular intimate female ritual and investigating the role – self-selected and enforced – of women in contemporary Irish society. Her artwork also focuses on authenticity in documentation by way of performance, film and drawing. She creates often absurd, socially awkward performance, in which costumes and props amount to an abject beauty.
Dorota Borowa is a Polish artist based in Dublin. She holds a Masters from the Painting Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Dorota has exhibited both nationally and internationally (including the Eight Gallery, Dublin, m² Gallery, Warsaw, By Other Means Gallery, London, Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok, Platan Gallery, Budapest, Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Tønsberg) and has been awarded a number of residency programmes. To date, Dorota has received two scholarships from the Polish Ministry of Culture. In 2016 she was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize. Her work has recently been selected for the second issue of independent publication Bloomers Magazine: Living Mountain which celebrates the work of emerging female artists based in Ireland. Borowa’s work was also recently featured in the film ‘Monument’ by award-winning Polish director Jagoda Szelc. Dorota is a co-founder of the Borowe Sisters Group. One of her ongoing projects is Map Books, inspired by travelling in South-East Asia. Dorota collaborates with m² Gallery in Warsaw.
Stephen Dunne’s work operates across the registers of painting, drawing and moving image. Works are produced in a spontaneous manner and attempt to draw upon the unconscious as a source material. The process of making, where each thing leads to the next through an experimental and intuitive approach is at the core of this work.
Dunne is a graduate of the M.A in Fine Art painting at the Royal College of Art and of NCAD and his recent exhibitions include “As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics” & “Wilder Beings Command” at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Niamh Davis is a Dublin based artist. She has a BFA from Crawford Art College, Cork and a Post Grad from UCD. She has had solo exhibitions in Cross Gallery, Dublin, nag Gallery, Dublin, PS2, Belfast and The Andrew Stone Gallery, Westport, as well as many group exhibitions throughout Ireland, Berlin and Timor Leste. In addition to the Mothership Project Satellite Residency in Cow House Studios, awards include Fire Station Artist’s Studio’s Digital Media Residency Award and the Backwater Artists Studio’s, Ciaran Langford Memorial Bursary Award.
Born in Dublin, Úna Quigley graduated from Crawford College of Art, Cork and Winchester School of Art, Spain & U.K. in 2001 with an MA in European Fine Art. She has since exhibited widely such as at the Kassel Film Festival, the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Centrum Berlin, Project Arts Centre, Ireland, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Ireland, and Crawford Gallery, Ireland.
In recent years she screened her film work at the National Film Archive in Seoul and Berliner Liste, had a solo exhibition The Interval at Centrum Berlin and co-created a cinema in the wilderness for a temporary project entitled Wild-screen in Connemara. She exhibited in Tulca The Headless City in 2016 and is premiering new work at the Istanbul Experimental film festival in 2018.
Quigley has been included in a number of publications, such as Cooling out – on the paradox of Feminism by Lewis Glucksman Gallery/Kunsthaus Baselland, and recently False Optimism published by Crawford Gallery Ireland and All Mountains begin on the Ground, an artists book of essays.
She has received awards from local authorities, Culture Ireland, the Arts Council of Ireland, and Ealaín na Gaeltachta and was most recently awarded an Artists Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2017.
Susan Montgomery is a visual artist from Wicklow and has lived in West Cork since 2007. She graduated from DLIATD in 1997. Her extensive exhibition record includes Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Doswell Gallery, Rosscarbery, Cross Gallery, Dublin, The Joinery, Dublin, Signal Arts Centre, Bray, Talbot gallery, Dublin and Greyfriars Municipal Gallery, Waterford.
Montgomery is a member of the experimental collective Tellurometer Project; recipient of a Wicklow County Council Award to fund a publication currently in progress. Additionally, educational work at West Cork Arts Centre since 2009 resulted in commissioned work and public engagement touring to Mermaid Arts Centre, Highlands Gallery and Wexford Arts Centre to accompany Mikala Dwyer’s Panto Collapsar. Other educational awards include a Cork County Council Commission by the County Library Service in 2015.
Susan Montgomery’s work belongs in the collections of OPW, Trinity College, Dublin, former First National Bank, The Ice Hotel, Ballina, Touchstone Healthcare and Waterford County Council.
The Mothership announces the 15 parenting artists who are recipients of residences:
This autumn, The Mothership Project in collaboration with Cow House Studios will run a pilot artist residency programme giving 15 parenting artists supported time and space to develop their practice, including childcare and accommodation on-site for children and partners.
The 15 artists travelling to Cow House Studios are Dorota Borowa, Stephen Dunne, Niamh Davis, Sarah Lincoln, Ruth Lyons, Ciara McMahon, Susan Montgomery, Celina Muldoon, Niamh O’Doherty, Sally O’Dowd, James O’hAodha, Una Quigley, Linda Quinlan, Ruby Wallis and Kate Warner.
Community update with Paul Gaffney
Paul Gaffney is one of four associate artists at Cow House Studios and participated in his first residency with us back in 2014. As an associate artist, Paul is a regular visitor to the farm and teaches during our summer program Art on the Farm. For the past number of years, he has been investigating different ways of experiencing and representing landscape. His research is focused on developing a meditative approach to landscape photography and explores how the act of image making can enable and disrupt a sense of connection with one’s surroundings.
Paul was recently selected for the Arts Council’s ‘Next Generation Bursary Award’ 2016-17. His books have been nominated for the Photobook Award at the International Photobook Festival Kassel (2013 & 2016), shortlisted for the European Publishers Award for Photography, and selected for several ‘Best Photobooks of The Year’ lists. Gaffney’s work has also been presented as solo exhibitions at the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (Luxembourg), Flowers Gallery (London), Gallery of Photography (Dublin), Belfast Exposed Gallery, Ffotogallery (Cardiff), Oliver Sears Gallery (Dublin) and in group shows and festivals in the US, UK, South Africa, Ireland, Italy, France and China. His images have been published internationally in print and online periodicals including American Suburb X, Harvard Design Review, Creative Review, The New Yorker, European Photography, DU Magazine, Katalog, PaperJam, Source, Photomonitor and Landscape Stories.
Paul recently took time out of his busy schedule to answer a few of our questions. Click through to read his answers.
Community update with Colin Matthes
Colin Matthes was one of four residency artists during our 2012 autumn residency. His practice includes painting, drawing, installation, zine and graphic production, and public art projects. Matthes has exhibited internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Antwerp, Dublin, Houston, Seville, Ljubljana, Melbourne, and Berlin.
In addition to his residency at Cow House, he has participated in numerous other residencies including Hotel Pupik (Austria) and Werkkamp (Belgium). He won the Mary L Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists in 2102 (Established) and 2007 (Emerging). In addition, Matthes works collectively with Justseeds, a network of twenty-six artists living in the United States, Canada, and Mexico that runs a print collective, contributes graphics to social movements, and co-publishes books.
Colin has been extremely generous with is time, taking care in thoughtfully answering our questions. It has been our privilege to catch up and read about all that has happened since his time with us in Ireland four years ago.
Date & Time: Saturday, November 12 at 3pm
Location: Wexford Arts Centre
Performance by artists Jessica Foley, Marjorie Potiron & Lisa Hoffmann, Steven Randall, and Alex Mirutziu AKA The Artist and Himself at 29 (TAH29)
Please click here to purchase tickets.
A bus is scheduled to depart from the Irish Museum of Modern Art at 12:30pm and return at 9pm.
Ticket includes:
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.
Cow House Studios and Kate Strain are delighted to announce the participating artists for the upcoming residency programme: The Centre For Dying On Stage #3
The participants of the 2016 Cow House Studios Autumn residency programme are: Jessica Foley, Marjorie Potiron & Lisa Hoffmann, Steven Randall, and The Artist and Himself at 29 (TAH29). The five artists will be invited to reside at Cow House Studios from 10 October – 20 November, with the collective aim of producing an exhibition in the form of a play, to be realised at Wexford Arts Centre, on 11 & 12 November 2016. We look forward to welcoming the incoming resident artists in October.
Wexford Arts Centre in collaboration with Cow House Studios are pleased to announce a group exhibition of 2014 residency artists Emma Schwartz (USA), Joey Bryniarska (UK), Mathilde Ganancia (France), Paul Gaffney (Ireland) and Woosung Lee (Korea). Now in it’s eighth year, Cow House Studios is a progressive artist-run school and residency programme situated on the […]