This week I have been...

...in West Cork. A place no one should ever go when the weather is bad in September. There were a couple of reasonable days, but then the weather got grimmer and grimmer until the fog completely obscured Cork and we were forced to attempt to visit the less weather-dependent sights, most of which we found closed when we got there.

I did manage to keep a daily diary, which was good - some excerpts of which are below.

High and low-lights included...

...the lovely tiny stone cottage we stayed in, where you could hear the sea from...

...plentiful rain...

...the Tragumna Threshing Festival, including an auction for half a pig. The pig was still alive at the Festival...

...the hilarious buttons in what I called the blame room in the Mizen Head Fog Signal Station...

...a Clonakilty Black Pudding burger for the amazing K...

...days of foggy grimness...

...nice eating from the Woodcock Smokery and local cheeses...

But most of all, my advice to anyone planning to go to Cork in September would be to avoid any bad weather, as the rest of Cork is basically Dunta (that's closed in Irish for you non-Irish speaking folk) from September on.

Better luck next time...

Solar System in Felt

Hooray, the kit I have been working on for what seems like years but is only months is finally up! Its the most difficult kit I have put together so far, and the most work intensive.

The main difficulty was trying to find a way to make all the planets to scale. Most models I've seen are only roughly to scale. The scale varies so hugely between them all, from just a couple of millimetres to 12 centimetres diameter. (That's a fraction of an inch to 5 inches for you imperial types.)

I had to resort to polystyrene balls for Jupiter and Saturn in the end. Much as I dislike polystyrene, I couldn't find a viable alternative. (Although the kit is available without the polystyrene - you can use tightly wound balls of wool instead...) I tried to remind myself that its about as bad as drinking three cups of tea in the canteen of Tallaght Hospital (only because that's the last place I got given polystyrene cups) but the joy of the kit lasts an awful lot longer.

Anyway, I enjoyed making this kit most of any of them so far, perhaps because I learned so much from it. I've included notes on each planet - its composition, what makes it the colour it is, the shape of its orbit and so on. And I chose to represent the planets in true colour - at least in the sense of being in the colours we would see it in, so the colours look duller than you might remember from enhanced photographs.

Anyway, you can read more about it here and buy it too if you like!

I found it a very difficult kit to price, as there is a huge amount of labour in putting it together. I have included all the different coloured fleece in paper bags labeled for each planet to avoid confusion - this took a lot of time, weighing out and packing up to four colours for each planet. And I used the best quality materials I could find...which also pushed the price up.

So, it is 30 euro...which feels like a lot to me, but to be honest is probably too low a price...how I hate pricing!

Anyway, its up on Etsy for anyone interested, hooray!

This week in pictures...

Memento Mori

...is the name of the show myself and my sister Jennifer Walshe have up at the moment in the

Roscommon Arts Centre. (Click on any image to see a bigger version.)

We decided to present it as a show curated by us, with work made by our alter egos, three each.

Mine are:

Nollaig Dottirson, a transgender Icelandic-Roscommon artist, who knits and felts violent artifacts - bombs, Molotov cocktails, security cameras and barbed wire.

"Nollaig's work is contextualised in her own transgendered and transnational experience (born in Reykjavik to Icelandic and Irish parents), wherein the sometimes violent renegotiation of her gender is metaphorised in her intimate, familiar and knitted appropriations of the iconography of war and aggression.

The project of feminising these icons challenges notions of masculinity and femininity, and explores violence both personal and political, from a sexually transgressive perspective."

...then comes An Snag Breac, an outsider artist living in Roscommon.

"An Snag Breac is Irish for the magpie, and represents the raiding and hoarding of unwanted objects, natural and artificial. It is the pseudonym of a Roscommon-based artist creating assemblages of phantasmagorical creatures from the discarded detritus of the natural and manufactured world.

Mixed media include textiles, wood, taxidermy using road kill animals and discarded objects. Plastic golems of flesh and bone, queer syntheses of steel, wood, skin and fleece, reflect on and recycle the workings of the inner world, both natural and psychological.

An Snag Breac’s ongoing experience of chronic pain (back and neck) underpins aspects of the biological and anatomical focus of her work, influencing her use of material – including a spine and acupuncture needles."

...and the embroidered advice handkerchiefs of textile artist Enda O'Rourke...

"Enda O’Rourke is a textile artist resident in the Boyle area. Enda’s work is a recreation and reflection of his personal history. Born in London to unmarried Irish parents, Enda was raised by his grandmother and aunts, learning to sew from an early age - the stitches and tradition dropped from grandmother to grandson. Enda’s work seeks to recreate the unspoken and lost libraries of his grandmother’s experience, in a tradition neither aural, nor written, but textile based, and in the voice his grandmother and the women who raised him bequeathed him.

Then we had Jenny's collection:

The Community Choir drawings from Turf Boon...

"Boon considers his Community Choir Drawings series an open-source composition, one in which the viewer is expected to be an active participant in decoding and assigning meaning.

The deployment of communal authorship in this project recalls for Boon the gift drawings and songs of the Shakers, drawings which were executed as depictions of heavenly inspirations or gifts. Gift drawings were not considered to be the work of an individual artist (the drawings were never signed), but a contribution to the whole community that could be employed as any member saw fit.

Boon’s Community Choir Drawings series is imbued with a similar sense of openness and generosity, which reflects his career-long engagement with the ethics of community and the importance of group spirit."

A film from Freya Birren.

Olia Lialina’s M.B.C.B.F.T.W. (Redux, At Rest)

"Russian artist Olia Lialina created her browser-based artwork My Boyfriend Came Back From The War in 1996. It is considered one of the first works of internet art, and tells the fragmented story of a woman and her boyfriend’s attempts to communicate and connect after he returns from fighting in a war.

Lialina’s work has been subject to many re-workings by different artists. Birren’s version takes Lialina’s as a starting point in both visual and textual terms. Here, however, a different story of a different soldier in a different war unfolds from Lialina’s opening line. Unlike Lialina’s pioneering use of the internet as an artisitic medium, Birren’s use of technology is deliberately low-fi - Postit notes simulate the frames of a browser, with the film processed to look like it was made in the 1970s."

Finally, the work of outsider artist CaoimhinBreathnach, shown for the first time since his death. He lived in Knockvicar and collected sound recordings, keeping a diary of his works in Ogham.

"The main focus of Breathnach’s artistic practice was the creation of his unique brand of “subliminal tapes.” This was a two-fold procedure - Breathnach began by recording sounds onto cassette tapes, before subjecting the tapes to a wide range of physical processes, such as burying, burning or encasing them in various materials such as velvet, paper or moss. In most cases, these physical processes rendered the tapes unplayable, so that the sounds recorded on them can now only be imagined.

For tape 79, Breathnach notes how he rose at dawn on the summer solstice (“grian-stad”) in 1982 to record himself playing a series of chords on the harp against the backdrop of his radio broadcasting at 1485 Khz. After sleeping with the tape under his pillow for a night, he then wore the tape strapped to his abdomen for a week, noticing significant improvement to his “strampail” and “glórghail” (both obscure words are defined in Dineen as referring to stomach noises)."

The show is on until Thursday the 25th for those of you in the area. More details here.