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Artist Nigel Rolfe films work at Lough Boora |
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Kevin O'Dwyer with artist Nigel Rolfe
Over the summer of 2010, artist Nigel Rolfe worked with curators Ian Russell and Kevin O'Dwyer on the selection of sites for the filming of a new piece of performance art. In June, Nigel and two artist assistants visited several sites in central and west County Offaly in Ireland, finally settling on a tract of disused industrially exploited bog just off the grounds of Sculpture in the Parklands in Lough Boora.
Nigel's intention is to directly address the physicality of the landscape of the bogs and materiality of peat. Over his site visits in June and August, Nigel developed and executed ways of addressing the form and feel of peat through immediate action. The working title for the project is 'I will follow', conjuring an inscription written by Joseph Beuys given to Caroline Tisdall. The photograph depicted Beuys running through the drainage channel of some boglands in Ireland, and it carried the inscription ' the other part of the irish running to you'.
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2010 Artists-in-residence site visits completed |
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In January and March 2010, artists Nigel Rolfe and Alfio Bonano took site visits to Sculpture in the Parklands with Ian Russell and Kevin O'Dwyer. The team began conversations about and explored possible sites for two new works (one from each artists) that will respond to the unique landscape and industrial heritages of the Lough Boora area.
Alfio Bonano will be in residency in late September 2010. More information on Alfio can be found here:
http://www.alfiobonanno.dk
Nigel will be in residency over the summer of 2010. More information on Nigel can be found here:
http://www.nigelrolfe.com/
http://www.greenonredgallery.com/artist.php?intArtistID=18
http://www.rca.ac.uk/Default.aspx?ContentID=504689 |
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2010 Artists-in-residence selected: Nigel Rolfe and Alfio Bonanno |
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The Ireland project team are delighted to announce that artists Nigel Rolfe and Alfio Bonanno have been selected as the artists-in-residence for 2010 at Sculpture in the Parklands as part of the Transformations Project.
Nigel Rolfe's work encompasses many media that include sound and audio production, video and photography. His primary reputation for the past thirty years is working live, making performances throughout Europe, and the former Eastern Block, North America and Japan.
In the 1980s and 90s he worked with the pan-European group Black Market International. Since the late 1990s he has made solo performances in Ireland at the National Sculpture Factory in Cork in 1998, the Cork Film Centre in 2002, The Church Gallery, Limerick in 2003 and Mount Shannon, Co. Clare in 2004 both as part of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s National programme.
In 2004 he took part in the European Performance Art Festival in Lublin, Poland and made a performance in the Images 04 Festival in Vevey, Switzerland.
He has exhibited in Biennales in Kwangju in 1997 and Sao Paulo in 1998. His retrospective Archive was shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1994, and Nigel Rolfe Videos 1983 – 1996 was exhibited as an installed retrospective at The Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1996. He has also had one person exhibitions of works with photography in Ireland, New York, France and Germany.
He is Visiting Professor in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in London, and Senior Visiting Critic to postgraduate fine art courses in the United States and Europe.
Born in the Isle of Wight in 1950, Nigel Rolfe lives and works in Dublin, Ireland.
Nigel will be in residency over the summer of 2010. More information on Nigel can be found here:
http://www.nigelrolfe.com/
http://www.greenonredgallery.com/artist.php?intArtistID=18
http://www.rca.ac.uk/Default.aspx?ContentID=504689
Alfio Bonanno was born in Milo (Etna), Sicily in 1947.
In the early 1950's his family immigrated to Australia, where he studied painting. In 1965 he returned to Sicily.
After working six years in Rome, Bonanno moved to the Island of Langeland in Denmark in 1973.
A pioneer of environmental art and a representative of the European development of Land Art or Art in Nature, Alfio Bonanno is a site-specific, outdoor installation artist who has been creating large-scale sculptures within selected, natural environments for the past 35 years.
The symbiosis between art, nature and ecology is an important aspect of his work, as is his role as artist, consultant and lecturer.
In 1985 his Sound Year Installation at the Miró Museum in Barcelona, Spain, a collaboration with Danish composer Gunner Møller Pedersen, was seen as a breakthrough in environmental art. It was on his initiative and with him as chairman that TICKON, Tranekær International Center for Art and Nature was created on the Danish Island of Langeland in 1990.
In 2004 he created Himmelhøj, a sculpture landscape containing four major site specific works commissioned by the Danish Minestry of the Environment and sited at Vestamager, Denmark.
In 2000 Lars R. Jensen and Torben K. Madsen with support from the Danish Film Institute and Danish Video workshop produced "Fragments of a Life", a 45 min. documentary film on Alfio Bonanno and his work. This Film has been shown on Danish National Television and at Film Festivals in Denmark (where it was awarded a prize). Also shown in Germany and at the Environmental Film Festival in Washington , DC, USA.
In 2005 he was awarded Hydro Texaco`s "Friend of the Tree" Prize. (Prisen "Træets ven").
In June 2006, Alfio Bonanno was awarded on behalf of the Italian President Carlo Azeglio Campi,The Order OSSI, Ordine della Stella della Solidarietá Italiana.
Since the late 1970's he has worked in many countries with and in natural and urban landscapes with site specific projects both with large structures of natures own materials and with conceptual acts.
Alfio Bonano will be in residency in late September 2010. More information on Alfio can be found here:
http://www.alfiobonanno.dk |
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Alan Counihan Residency Interview |
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Julian Wild Residency Interview |
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Julian Wild Residency Process Videos |
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Alan Counihan Residency Process Videos |
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Sculpture in the Parklands Launches You Tube Channel |
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To facilitate dissemination of information about the projects currently being undertaken in the Sculpture in the Parklands scenario. Ian Russell has begun producing interview videos with the artists during their process. These have begun the basis for a You Tube Channel which will feature interviews with all artists who have worked in the Parklands since its creation. This is planned to be a step towards creating media accessible via mobile technology by visitors to the Parklands.
Tune into the channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/sculptureparkireland |
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Sculpture in the Parklands 2009 Residencies |
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Sculpture in the Parklands hosted its 2009 artist in residence programme from August 31st to September 18th.
Artists Julian Wild (UK) and Alan Counihan (Ireland) worked on site for three weeks creating artwork inspired by the rich industrial and environmental heritage of the peatlands.
Since 2003 Julian Wild has been making a series of works called ”Systems”. These works are sequentially numbered. The numerical order of the series is partly an attempt to de-romanticise the titling process and partly to encourage the viewer to focus on their response to the work. The “Systems” series has taken Julian on a journey through self-contained sculptures, installations, drawings and public art projects.
Over the last 2 years Julian has gleaned pieces of metal scrap from the Bord na Mona workshops in Lough Boora. He sees the process as a kind of archaeology in which each old cog and piece of metal tells part of the story of the sites’ rich industrial heritage.
Welding these scrap pieces of peat wagons and cutting machinery together, the artist will construct an 18 metre long sculpture in a canal at the site. The concept is to create a disk that appears to bounce over the surface of the canal, like a skimming stone.
Alan Counihan’s practice engages with the human relationship to landscape, and how it is inhabited, remembered and imagined. His work seeks to explore the need to imbue landscape with meaning and inherited notions of cultural identity, the enshrinement of memory in place and its inevitable erosion and revision.
Alan’s work at Sculpture in the Parklands will continue to explore mans relationship with his landscape. Alan states: “From the outset I have wanted to create a work which would bring those who engage with it down into the bogland landscape so that one might experience a sense of its dark matter and the remains if not the memory of the bright surface life it contains and preserves. I wished to explore beneath the great flatness of Boora bog so that the experience of engagement with the work might also feel like an engagement with time, the past and the processes of material decay.”
Official launch of sculptures took place on Friday, September 18th. Interviews of the artists reflecting on their residencies produced by Ian Russell (www.iarchitectures.com) will be disseminated on the Trans Form Actions website.
Please visit our website at: www.sculptureintheparklands.com |
 The Lough Boora Parklands are a unique public landscape feature in the Midlands in Ireland. With a tradition of supporting artistic intervention in the landscape, the Sculpture in the Parklands project under the directorship of Kevin O’Dwyer provides an opportunity for LandArt interventions within the rich and diverse cultural landscape of the Midlands of Ireland. Resonating with the industrial heritage of peat extraction, human interaction with wetlands and boglands and with rural community arts projects, the setting of the Sculpture in the Parklands project provides a superb scenario for the exploration of themes of landscape transformation, human agency and environmental and ecological sustainability.
University College Dublin will be responsible for the intervention. The project will be directed by Professor Gabriel Cooney with day to day management by Dr Ian Russell supported by Andrew Cochrane. The intervention will be organised in collaboration with and executed by Kevin O’Dwyer of Sculpture in the Parklands, Lough Boora Parklands. The intervention will consist of installations of art pieces by prominent international landscape artists within the Lough Boora Parklands, Co. Offaly and University College Dublin. The first of these installations will run in parallel with the opening of the World Peat Conference in Tullamore, Co. Offaly and the World Archaeological Congress in University College Dublin both of which will be held in June 2008. Subsequent installations will occur within the Lough Boora Parklands on a yearly basis in 2009 and 2010. The collaboration between University College Dublin and the Lough Boora Parklands will also allow for academic and artistic investment in local, rural communities in Offaly through the provision of public lectures and guided tours by members of the academic community of University College Dublin. There will also be an exhibition and presentations of the results of this intervention as well as of other interventions in the Transformations project at the World Archaeological Congress at University College Dublin in June 2008.
The timing of this intervention with the World Archaeological Congress and World Peat Conference offers the opportunity to present the results of this intervention as well as the Trans-formations project to a global audience. This will facilitate global awareness of the scenarios and the interventions not only in Ireland but also throughout the European landscape.
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